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GREECE AND BABYLON
GREECE AND BABYLON
A COMPARATIVE SKETCH OF
MESOPOTAMIAN, ANATOLIAN
AND HELLENIC RELIGIONS
BY
LEWIS R. FARNELL, D.LITT., M.A.
FELLOW OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD
AUTHOR OF
"CULTS OF THE GREEK STATES" DEVOLUTION OF RELIGION"
"HIGHER ASPECTS OF GREEK RELIGION" (HIBBERT LECTURES)
EDINBURGH : T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET
191 1
Printed ly
MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED,
FOR
T. & T. CLARK, EDINBURGH.
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT, AND co. LIMITED.
NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
TO
DR. HENRY WILDE
THE FOUNDER OF THE WILDE LECTURESHIP
IN NATURAL AND COMPARATIVE RELIGION
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
THESE FIRST-FRUITS OF HIS ENDOWMENT
ARE DEDICATED
BY
THE FIRST WILDE LECTURER
EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD,
November 1911.
If! f
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
INAUGURAL LECTURE ...... i
CHAPTER II.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM AND THE EVIDENCE.
Indebtedness of primitive Greek religion to Mesopotamian
influences Various kinds of evidence to be considered :
Texts and Monuments of Mesopotamia, Syria, Canaan,
Hittite Kingdom, Asia-Minor coast, Minoan-Mycenaean
area Necessity of determining when the North- Aryan
tribes entered Greece, and what they brought with them
Influences from Mesopotamia on Greece of the second
millennium at least not direct Precariousness of theory of
religious borrowing Special lines that the inquiry will
pursue ....... 29
CHAPTER III.
MORPHOLOGY OF THE COMPARED RELIGIONS.
Distinction between nature religions and ethical religions
unsound The degree of personality in the cult-objects
a better criterion The earliest system known in Mesopo-
tamia a polytheism with personal deities, but con-
taining certain products of animism and polydaimonism
Other Semitic and non-Semitic peoples of Asia Minor,
the Minoan-Mycenaean races, the earliest Greek tribes,
already on the plane of personal theism in the second
millennium B.C. . . . . .40
CHAPTER IV.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND THERIOMORPHISM IN ANATOLIA AND
THE MEDITERRANEAN.
Mesopotamian religious conception generally anthropomorphic,
but the anthropomoiphism " unstable " Theriomorphic
vii
viii CONTENTS
features, especially of daimoniac powers Mystic imagina-
tion often theriomorphic Individuality of deities some-
times indistinct Female and male sometimes fused The
person becomes the Word Similar phenomena in other
Semitic peoples Theriolatry more prominent in Hittite
religion, though anthropomorphism the prevalent idea
The Minoan- Mycenaean religion also mainly anthro-
pomorphic The evidence of theriolatry often misinter-
preted The proto-Hellenic religion partly theriomorphic
Some traces of theriolatry even in later period, in spite
of strong bias towards anthropomorphism . . .
CHAPTER V.
PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS.
Importance of the phenomenon in the history of religions
In Mesopotamia and other Semitic regions the chief deity
male, except Astarte at Sidon Evidence from Hittite
kingdoms doubtful, but at points on the Asia-Minor coast,
such as Ephesos, and notably in Phrygia, the supremacy
of the goddess well attested The same true on the whole
of Cretan religion The earliest Hellenes, like other Aryan
communities, probably inclined to exalt the male deity,
and did not develop the cult of Virgin goddesses There-
fore Athena and Artemis probably pre-Hellenic . . 81
CHAPTER VI.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS.
Shamash the sun-god derives his personal character from the
nature-phenomenon ; but the Babylonian deities develop
their personality independently of their nature-origin,
which is often doubtful Importance of Sin, the moon-god
Star-worship in Babylonian cult No clear recognition of
an earth-goddess Tammuz a vegetation-power Western
Canaanites worship nature-deities in the second millennium,
probably with moral attributes The Hittites a thunder-
god and corn-god The Phrygians a mother-goddess of the
earth and lower world On the whole, pre-Homeric Hellas
worships ethical personalities rather than nature-powers
Distinguished from Mesopotamia by comparative insig-
nificance of solar, lunar, astral cults Also by the great
prominence of the earth-goddess and the association of
CONTENTS ix
PAGE
CHAPTER VII.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS.
The religious origin of the city Slight evidence from Mesopo-
tamia, more from early Greece Early Mesopotamian king-
ship of divine type The king inspired and occasionally
worshipped The Hittite monuments show the divine
associations of the king Proto-Hellenic kingship probably
of similar character Social usages protected by religion
in the whole of this area No family cult of the hearth
at Babylon The code of Hammurabi Comparatively
secular in its enactments concerning homicide Religious
feeling perceptible in the laws concerning incest The
legal system attached to religion at certain points, but on
the whole, independent of it In early Hellas the religion
an equally stiong social force, but many of its social
manifestations different Religion tribal and "phratric"
in Greece ; not so in Babylon Purification from blood-
shed could not have been borrowed from Mesopotamia . 116
CHAPTER VIII.
RELIGION AND MORALITY.
The deity conceived on the whole as beneficent and righteous,
but the divine destructive power more emphasised in
Babylonia Every Babylonian deity moralised, not every
Hellenic In both societies perjury a sin, untruthfulness
only in Babylonian religious theory International mor-
ality The ethics of the family very vital in both societies,
but more complex in Babylonia Ritualistic tabus a
heavier burden on the Babylonian conscience Morality
more daimonistic than in Greece In the Babylonian con-
fessional stress laid on unknown involuntary sin, hence
tendency to pessimism In Greece less timidity of con-
science, less prominence of magic Mercifulness a
prominent divine attribute in both religions More pan-
theistic thought and a clearer sense of the divinity of all
life in Babylonian theology, as in the Tammuz-myth . 141
CHAPTER IX.
PURITY A DIVINE ATTRIBUTE.
Ritual purity generally demanded Babylonian mythology far
purer than the Greek Character of Ishtar Virginity a
divine attribute Mystic conception of a virgin-mother,
the evidence examined in East and West . . .163
x CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER X.
CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER AND ANCIENT COSMOGONIES.
Neither in Babylon nor Greece any clear and consistently main-
tained dogma of divine omnipotence Yet the divinities
collectively the strongest power in the universe No de-
veloped theory of dualism The divine power combined with
magic in Babylonia, but not in Greece No early Hellenic
consciousness of the Word as a creative force The magic
power of the divine name felt by the Hellenes, but not
realised as a creative force Babylonian cosmogonies not
traceable in the earliest Greek mythology, nor in Hcsiod,
but the myth of Typhoeus probably from Babylonian
sources Babylonian myths concerning creation of man
not known in early Greece Organisation of the polytheism
into divine groups Evidence of Trinitarian idea and of
monotheistic tendency No proof here of Greek indebted-
ness to Mesopotamia . . . . .173
CHAPTER XI.
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT OF THE EASTERN AND WESTERN
PEOPLES.
The i elation of the individual to the deity more intimate in
Mesopotamia than in Greece The religious temper more
ecstatic, more prone to self-abasement, sentimentality,
rapture Humility and the fear of God ethical virtues
in Babylonia The child named after the god in both
societies In some Semitic communities the deity takes
a title from the worshipperFanaticism in Mesopotamian
religion, entire absence of it in the Hellenic . . . 190
CHAPTER XII.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST.
General resemblances between Mesopotamian and early
Hellenic rites of tendance of dead Mesopotamian theory
of the lower world gloomier The terror of the spectre
stronger in the East than in the West ; yet both fear the
miasma of the dead In both, the literary evidence clashes
somewhat with the evidence from the graves Certain
important differences in tendance of dead 'Water essential
in later Babylonian, wine and the triple libation in early
Hellenic Hero-cult strong in early Hellas, at least very
rare in Mesopotamia Hellenic idea of re-incarnation not
CONTENTS xi
PAGE
yet found in Babylonian records The evocation of ghosts,
and the periodic meals with or in memory of the dead,
common to both peoples General All Souls' festival But
in Babylonia no popular belief in posthumous punishments
and rewards The powers of the lower world more gloomy
and repellent than in Hellas- No mysteries to develop the
germs of a brighter eschatologic faith . . .204
CHAPTER XIII.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL.
In the second millennium all Semitic communities had evolved
the temple, and Babylonia the idol In Greece, temple-
building was coming into vogue, but the cults still aniconic
The pillar and the phallic emblem common in early
Greece, very rare in Mesopotamia Sacrifice both in East
and West of two types, the blood-sacrifice and the bloodless,
but in Hellas vyfitiXia iepd in early vogue, not yet found
in the East Incense unknown to the pre-Homeric Greeks
The distinction between Chthonian and Olympian ritual
not found at Babylon Communion-sacrifice and sacra-
ment in early Greece, not found as yet in Mesopotamia
Vicarious piacular sacrifice common to both regions, but
human sacrifice rife in early Greece, not found in Meso-
potamia Mystic use of blood in Greek ritual, immola-
tion or expulsion of the scape-goat not yet discovered in
Mesopotamia The death of the divinity in Babylonian
ritual Mourning for Tammuz In other Semitic communi-
ties In Hittite worship, Sandon of Tarsos Attis of Phrygia
Emasculation in Phrygian ritual, alien to Babylonian as
to Hellenic religious sentiment Death of divinity in Cretan
ritual, and in Cyprus In genuine Hellenic religion, found
only in agrarian hero-cults, such as Linos, Eunostos ; these
having no connection with Tammuz Babylonian liturgy
mainly a service of sorrow, Greek mainly cheerful A holy
marriage at Babylon, on Hittite relief at Boghaz-Keui,
in Minoan and Hellenic ritual A mortal the consort of
divinity, an idea found in many races widely removed
Greek evidence Consecrated women in Mesopotamia, two
types Their functions to be distinguished from the conse-
cration of virginity before marriage mentioned by Herodotus
Other examples of one or the other of these customs in
Asia Minor Various explanations of these customs offered
by anthropology Criticism of different views Their
religious significance Ritual of purification Cathartic
use of water and fire Preservation of peace during public
purification Points of agreement between Hellas and
xii CONTENTS
Babylonia Points of difference, Babylonian confessional
Value of Homer's evidence concerning early Hellenic
purification Babylonian magic in general contrast with
Greek Astrologic magic Magic value of numbers, of the
word Babylonian exorcism Magic use of images No
severance in Mesopotamia between magic and religion
Babylonian and Hellenic divination . . .221
CHAPTER XIV.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS ..... , 304
GREECE AND BABYLON.
CHAPTER I.
INAUGURAL LECTURE.
THE newly-elected holder of a University professorship or
lectureship, before embarking on the course of special
discussion that he has selected, may be allowed or
expected to present some outlined account of the whole
subject that he represents, and to state beforehand, if
possible, the line that he proposes to pursue in regard
to it. This is all the more incumbent on me, as I have
the honour to be the first Wilde Lecturer in Natural
and Comparative Religion the first, that is, who has
been officially charged by the University to give public
teaching in the most modern and one of the most
difficult fields of study, one that has already borne
copious fruit, and will bear more in the future. I
appreciate highly the honour of such a charge, and I
take this opportunity of expressing my deep sense of
the indebtedness of our University and of all students
of this subject to Dr. Wilde for his generous endow-
ment of this branch of research, which as yet has only
found encouragement in a few Universities of Europe,
America, and Japan, I feel also the responsibility of
my charge. Years of study have shown me the magnitude
of the subject, the pitfalls that here more, perhaps,
2 GREECE AND BABYLON
than in other fields beset the unwary, and the multi-
plicity of aspects from which it may be studied. Having
no predecessor, I cannot follow, but may be called upon
rather to set, a precedent.
One guidance, at least, I have namely, the expressed
wishes of the founder of this post. He has formulated
them in regard to Comparative Religion in such a way
that I feel precluded, in handling this part of the whole
field, from what may be called the primitive anthro-
pology of religion. I shall not, therefore, deal directly
with the embryology of the subject, with merely savage
religious psychology, ritual, or institutions. It is not
that I do not feel myself the fascination of these subjects
of inquiry, and their inevitableness for one who wishes
wholly to understand the whole of any one of the higher
world-religions.
But we have in the University one accomplished
exponent of these themes in Mr. Marett, and until
recently we have been privileged to possess Professor
Tylor ; and Dr. Wilde has made his wishes clear that
the exposition of Comparative Religion should be mainly
an elucidation and comparison of the higher forms and
ideas in the more advanced religions. And I can
cheerfully accept this limitation, as for years I have been
occupied with the minute study of the religion of Greece,
in which one finds much, indeed, that is primitive, even
savage, but much also of religious thought and religious
ethic, unsuspected by former generations of scholars,
that has become a rich inheritance of our higher culture.
He who wishes to succeed in this new field of arduous
inquiry should have studied at least one of the higher
religions of the old civilisation au fond, and he must
have studied it by the comparative method. He may
then make this religion the point of departure for wide
INAUGURAL LECTURE 3
excursions into outlying tracts of the more or less
adjacent religious systems, and he will be the less likely
to lose himself in the maze and tangle of facts if he
can focus the varying light or doubtful glimmer they
afford upon the complex set of phenomena with which
he is already familiar.
And the Greek religion serves better than any other
that I know for such a point of departure, the influences
being so numerous that radiated upon it. It had its
own special inheritance, which it fruitfully developed,
from the North, from its proto-Aryan past, and which
we shall be able to define with greater clearness when
comparative religion has done its work upon the religious
records of the early Aryan peoples. Also, the Hellene
had many intimate points of contact with earlier and
alien peoples of the ancient Mediterranean culture whom
he conquered and partly absorbed, or with whom he
entered into intellectual or commercial relations. There-
fore the religions of the Minoan Age, of the Anatolian
peoples, of Egypt, and finally of Babylon and Persia, come
inevitably to attract the student of the Hellenic.
As far, then, as I can see at present, I may have to
limit my attention in the lecture-courses of these three
years during which I fill this post, to the phenomena of
the Mediterranean area, and these are more than one
man can thoroughly elucidate in a lifetime, as the
manifold activity in various departments of this field,
attested by the Transactions of our recent Congress of
the History of Religions, will prove to those who read
them. And I shall endeavour in the future to follow
out one main inquiry through a short series of lectures,
as this is the best method for a reasoned statement
of consecutive thought. But I propose in this lecture
to sketch merely in outlines the salient features of some
4 GREECE AND BABYLON
of the religions of the Mediterranean area, and hope
thereby to indicate the main problems which the
student of comparative religion must try to solve, or
the leading questions he must ask, and thus, perhaps,
to be able to suggest to others as well as to myself
special lines of future research and discussion.
What, then, are the questions which naturally arise
when we approach the study of any religion that has
advanced beyond the primitive stage ? We wish to
discover with definiteness what is the idea of divinity
that it has evolved, in what forms and with what con-
cepts this idea is expressed whether, for instance,
the godhead is conceived as a vague " numen," or as
a definite personality with complex character and
functions, and whether it is imagined or presented
to sense in anthropomorphic forms.
The question whether the religion is monotheistic
or polytheistic is usually answered at a glance, unless
the record is unusually defective ; but in the case of
polytheism careful inquiry is often needed to answer
the other morphological questions that press them-
selves upon us, whether the polytheism is an organised
system of co-ordinated and subordinated powers or a
mere medley of uncorrelated deities. If the former,
whether the unifying tendency has developed in the
direction of monotheism or pantheism.
Again, the study of the attributes and functions
ascribed and the titles attached to the deity will enable
us to answer the questions concerning his relation to the
world of Nature, to the social sphere of law, politics,
and morality ; and in this quest we may hope to gain
fruitful suggestions concerning the interaction of religion,
social organisation, and ethics. We shall also wish to
know whether the religion is dogmatic or not that is
INAUGURAL LECTURE 5
to say, whether it lays stress on precise theological
definitions ; whether it claims to possess sacred books
or a revelation ; whether it contains the idea of faith
as a cardinal virtue. Further, it is always interesting
to consider whether it has engendered a cosmogony,
a theory of the cosmos, its origin, maintenance, and
possible dissolution ; and whether it is instinctively
favourable or antagonistic to the growth of the scientific
spirit, to the free activity of the intellect ; and, finally,
whether it gives prominence to the belief in the
immortality of the soul and to the doctrine of posthumous
rewards and punishments.
There are also certain special questions concerning
the nature and powers of the divinity that are found
to be of importance. The distinction of sex in the
anthropomorphic religions, the paramountcy of the god
or the goddess, is observed to produce a singular effect
in religious psychology, and may be associated with
fundamental differences in social institutions, with the
distinction, for instance, between a patrilinear and a
matrilinear society. As regards the powers attributed
to the divinity, we may endeavour to discern certain
laws of progress or evolution in progressive societies
an evolution, perhaps, from a more material to a more
spiritual conception, or, again, from a belief in divinities
finite and mortal to a dogma that infinity, omniscience,
and immortality are their necessary attributes. On
this line of inquiry we are often confronted with the
phenomenon of the death of the god or goddess, and
no single fact in the history of religions is of more
interest and of more weight. Also, we frequently find
an antagonism between malevolent and benevolent
powers, whence may arise a philosophic conception of
dualism in Nature and the moral world.
6 GREECE AND BABYLON
There are, further, the questions concerning ritual,
often very minute, but of none the less significance.
What are the forms of worship, sacrifice, prayer, adora-
tion ? As regards sacrifice, is it deprecatory merely, a
bribe to avert wrath, or is it a gift to secure favour, or is
it a token of friendly trust and affection, or a mystic act
of communion which effects between the deity and the
worshipper a temporary union of body and soul ? In
the study of ritual we may consider the position of the
priesthood, its power over the religion, and through the
religion over the State, and the sources of that power.
This enumeration of the problems is long, but I fear
by no means exhaustive. I have not yet mentioned
the question that may legitimately arise, and is the
most perplexing of all that which is asked concerning
the vital power and influence of a certain religion, its
strength of appeal, its real control of the people's
thoughts and acts. The question, as we know, is
difficult enough when we apply it to modern societies ;
it may be quite hopeless when applied to an ancient
State. It is only worth raising when the record is
unusually ample and varied, and of long continuity ;
when we can believe that it enshrines the thoughts
of the people, not merely of the priest or of the philo-
sopher. We are more likely to believe this when the
record is rich not only in literature, but in monuments.
It may also be demanded that the history of religions
should include a history of their decay, and, in his
brilliant address at the recent Congress, Professor Petrie
has formulated this demand as one that Egyptology
might fulfil. Certainly it belongs to the scientific
treatment of our subject to note the circumstances and
operative causes that induced a certain people to abandon
their ancestral beliefs and cults ; but whether from the
INAUGURAL LECTURE 7
careful study of each special case certain general laws
will emerge by process of induction may be doubted.
It will depend partly on the completeness of our records
and our skill in their interpretation.
I will conclude this sketch of an ideal programme,
which I, as least, can never hope to make actual, with
one last query Is it the main object of this comparative
study to answer the inquiry as to the reciprocal influences
of adjacent religions, to distinguish between the alien
and the native elements in any particular system to
estimate, for instance, what Greece owed to Babylon,
to Egypt, to India ? Certainly the problem is proper
to our province, is attractive, and even hopeful, and I
have ventured to approach it myself. But I should
hesitate to allow that it is the main one, and that the
value of our study is to be measured by our success in
solving it ; for, whatever answer we finally give to such
questions, or if we abandon in despair the attempt to
answer them precisely, it is none the less fruitful to
compare the Babylonian, Indo-Iranian, Egyptian, and
Hellenic systems of belief for instance, to consider
the Orphic eschatology in relation to the Buddhistic,
even if we reject the theory that Buddhistic influences
could have penetrated into early Orphism.
I will now sketch what I have perceived to be the
higher elements or more developed features in Hellenic
religion, and will consider in regard to each of these how
it contrasts with or resembles the cults of the other
leading peoples of this area. The Hellenic high divinity
is, in the first place, no mere shadowy " numen," no
vague spirit-power or semi-personal divine force, such
as the old Roman belief often seems to present us with,
nor is he usually conceived as a divine element immanent
in certain things ; but he appears as a concrete personal
8 GREECE AND BABYLON
individual of definite physical traits and complex
moral nature. Vaguer and cruder ideas no doubt
survived right through the historic period, and the
primitive ancestor of the Hellene may once have lived in
the religious phase of thought in which the personal god
has not yet emerged or not yet been detached from the
phenomenon or the world of living matter. But I believe
that the Greek of the historic, and even of the Homeric,
period had left this phase far more remotely behind him
than certain modern theorists have lightly supposed,
and I am convinced that the proto-Hellenic tribes
had already before the conquest of Greece developed
the cult of certain personal deities, and that some,
at least, of these were the common heritage of several
tribes. It is quite possible that before they crossed
the northern frontier of Greece they found such divinities
among their Aryan kinsfolk of Thrace, and it is certain
that this was the type of religion that they would mainly
find among the peoples of the Minoan- Mycenaean
culture.
We discern it also, where the record allows us to
discern anything, among the nearer and remoter stocks
of the Asiatic side of the Mediterranean area. In the
Zend-Avesta, the sacred books of the Persian religion,
Ahura-Mazda is presented as a noble ethical figure, a
concrete personal god, like Jahwe of Israel, whatever his
original physical significance may have been. Marduk
of Babylon, whom Hammurabi, the consolidator of the
Babylonian power, raised to the rank of the high god,
may once have been a sun-god, but he transcended his
elemental nature, and appears in the records of the
third millennium as a political deity, the war-god, and
leader of the people, as real a personality as Hammurabi
himself. The same is true of Asshur, once the local
INAUGURAL LECTURE 9
deity of the aboriginal land of the Assyrians, but later
raised by the imperial expansion of this people almost
to the position of a universal god, the guardian of the
land, the teacher and the father of the kings ; nor can
we discern that he was ever an elemental god.
Speaking generally, in spite of many important
differences, we may regard the religious structure to
which the cults of Anatolia and Egypt belonged as
morphologically the same as that which I am defining
as Hellenic. Also, among all these peoples, by the
side of the few higher deities who have developed moral
personalities, we find special elemental divinities, as,
in Hellas, we find Helios and the deities of the wind,
Hephaistos the fire-god.
The distinction between the religions of the Hellenes
and " the barbarians," which Aristophanes defines as
the difference between the worship of ideal divine
personages, such as Zeus, Apollo, and Demeter, and the
direct worship of elementary powers, such as sun and
moon, is not borne out by modern research. Where we
find sun-worship or moon-worship in the East, it does
not appear to have been directed immediately to the
thing itself regarded as a living or animate body, but
to a personal god of the sun or the moon-^-Bel, Shamash,
or Sin. We can only distinguish the Greek from the
Oriental in respect of Nature-religion by the lesser
degree of devotion that the Hellene showed to it; Only
those of his divinities whose names connoted nothing
in the material or natural world, could develop into free
moral personalities, and dominate the religious imagina-
tion of the people. Nowhere, for instance, had Helios
any high position in the Greek world except at Rhodes,
where we must reckon with pre-Hellenic, Minoan, and
later with Semitic influences. Therefore, when, shortly
io GREECE AND BABYLON
before and after the beginning of the Graeco-Roman
period, a wave of sun-worship welled from the East
over the West, it may have brought with it religious
ideas of high spirituality and ethical purity, yet by the
race-consciousness of the Hellenes it must have been
judged to be a regress towards a barbaric past.
The instinct of the Greek in his creation of divine
forms shows always a bias towards the personal and the
individual, an aversion to the amorphous and vague,
and herein we may contrast him with the Persian and
Egyptian. A certain minor phenomenon in these
religions will illustrate and attest this. All of them
admitted by the side of the high personal deities certain
subordinate personages less sharply conceived, divine
emanations, as we may sometimes call them, or
personifications of moral or abstract ideas. Plutarch
specially mentions the Persian worship of Truth, Good-
will, Law-abidingness, Wisdom, emanations of Ahura-
Mazda, which in the light of the sacred books we may,
perhaps, interpret as the Fravashis or Soul-powers
of the High God ; and in certain Egyptian myths and
religious records we hear of a personification of Truth,
whose statue is described by the same writer. But
at least in the Persian system we may suspect that such
divine beings had little concrete personality, but, rather,
were conceived vaguely as daimoniac forces, special
activities of divine force in the invisible world. Now
the Greek of the period when we really know him seems
to have been mentally unable to allow his consciousness
of these things or these forces to remain just at that
point. Once, no doubt, it was after this fashion that
his ancestors dimly imagined Eros, or the half-per-
sonal Curse-power 'Apa; but he himself could only
cherish Eros under the finished and concrete form of a
INAUGURAL LECTURE n
beautiful personal god, and the curse was only vitalised
for him when it took on the form of the personal Erinys.
This topic is a fruitful one, and I hope to develop it
on a later occasion.
It suggests what is now the next matter I wish to
touch on the comparison of the Mediterranean religions
in respect of their anthropomorphism. Philosophically,
the term might be censured as failing to distinguish
any special type of religion ; for we should all admit
that man can only envisage the unseen world in forms
intelligible to his own mind and reflecting his own
mental structure. But, apart from this truism, we
find that religions differ essentially and vitally according
as this anthropomorphism is vague and indefinite or
sharply defined and dominating ; according as they
picture the divinity as the exact though idealised
counterpart of man, and construct the divine society
purely on the lines of the human, or refrain from doing
this either through weakness and obscurity of imagina-
tion or in deference to a different and perhaps more
elevated law of the religious intellect. Now, of the
Hellenic religion no feature is salient as its anthropo-
morphism, and throughout its whole development and
career the anthropomorphic principle has been more
dominating and imperious than it has ever been found
to be in other religions. 1 At what remote period in
the evolution of the Hellenic mind this principle began
in force, what were the influences that fostered and
strengthened it, in what various ways it shaped the
religious history of the Hellenic people, are questions
that I may be able to treat more in detail in the future.
1 1 am aware that there are exceptions to this principle, which I
propose to consider in a future course ; no single formula can ever sum
up all the phenomena of a complex religion.
12 GREECE AND BABYLON
But there are two important phenomena that I will
indicate now, which we must associate with it, and
which afford us an illuminating point of view from
which we may contrast the Greek world and the
Oriental. In the first place, the anthropomorphic
principle, combining with an artistic faculty the highest
that the world has known, produced in Greece a unique
form of idolatry ; and, in the second place, in consequence
chiefly of this idolatry, the purely Hellenic religion
remained almost incapable of that which we call
mysticism.
Now, much remains still to be thought out, especially
for those interested in Mediterranean culture, concerning
the influence of idolatry on religion ; and not only the
history, but the psychology of religion, must note and
estimate the influence of religious art. It may well
be that the primitive Greeks, like the primitive Roman,
the early Teuton, and Indo-Iranian stocks, were non-
idolatrous, and this appears to have been true to some
extent of the Minoan culture. Nevertheless, the
Mediterranean area has from time immemorial been the
centre of the fabric and the worship of the eikon and the
idol. The impulse may have come from the East or
from Egypt to the Hellene ; he in his turn imparted
it to the Indian Aryans, as we now know, and in great
measure at least to the Roman, just as the Assyrian-
Babylonian temple-worship imparted it to the Persian.
Nowhere, we may well believe, has the influence of
idolatry been so strong upon the religious temperament
as it was upon that of the Hellenes ; for to it they
owed works of the type that may be called the human-
divine, which surpass any other art-achievement of
man.
I can here only indicate briefly its main effects. It
INAUGURAL LECTURE 13
intensified the perception of the real personal god as a
material fact. It increased polytheism by multiplying
the separate figures of worship, often, perhaps, without
intention. It assisted the imagination to discard what
was uncouth and terrifying in the Hellenic religion, and
was at once the effect and the cause of the attachment
of the Hellenic mind towards mild and gracious types of
godhead. The aniconic emblem and uncouth fetich-
formed figures were here and there retained, because of
vague ideas about luck or for superstitious fetichistic
reasons ; but the beautiful idol was cherished because it
could arouse the enthusiastic affection of a sensitive
people, and could bring them to the very presence of a
friendly divine person. The saying that the Olympian
deities died of their own loveliness means a wrong
interpretation of the facts and the people. But for a
beautiful idolatry, Hellenic polytheism would have
passed away some centuries before it did, the deities
fading into alien types or becoming fused one with the
other. Nor was its force and influence exhausted by
the introduction of Christianity, for it shaped the
destinies of the Greek Church, and threw down a
victorious challenge to the iconoclastic Emperors.
If now we were to look across the Mediterranean,
and could survey the religious monuments of Persia,
Assyria and Babylonia, Phoenicia, and the Hittite
people, we should find a general acceptance of the
anthropomorphic idea. The high personal deities are
represented mainly in human form, but the art is not
able to interpret the polytheistic beliefs with skilfully
differentiated types. In Chaldaic and Assyrian art one
type of countenance is used for various divinities, and
this such as might inspire awe rather than affection. And
the anthropomorphism is unstable. Often animal traits
I 4 GREECE AND BABYLON
appear in parts of the divine figure. Nergal has a lion's
head; even the warrior Marduk is invoked in the
mystic incantations as " Black Bull of the Deep, Lion
of the dark house." l In fact, over a large part of an-
terior Asia, anthropomorphism and theriomorphism
exist side by side in religious concept and religious art.
We may say the same of Egypt, but here theriomorphism
is the dominating factor.
As regards the explanation of this phenomenon,
many questions are involved which are outside my
present province. I would only express my growing
conviction that these two distinct modes of representing
the divine personage to the worshipper are not neces-
sarily prior and posterior, the one to the other, in the
evolution of religion. They can easily, and frequently
do, coexist. The vaguely conceived deity shifts his
shape, and the same people may imagine him mainly
as a glorified man of human volition and action, and
yet think of him as temporarily incarnate in an animal,
and embody his type for purposes of worship or religious
art in animal forms.
I would further indicate here what I cannot prove in
detail that theriomorphism lends itself to mysticism,
while the anthropomorphic idolatry of Greece was
strongly in opposition to it. The mystic theosophy
that pervaded later paganism, and from which early
Christianity could not escape, originated, as Reiteenstein
has well shown, mainly in Egypt, and it arose partly,
I think, in connection with the hieratic and allegorical
interpretation of the theriomorphic idol. There was
nothing mystic about the Zeus of Pheidias, so far as
the form of the god was concerned. The forms were
1 Vide Langdon, in Transactions of Congress of the History of
Religions, 1908, vol. i. p. 251.
INAUGURAL LECTURE 15
entirely adequate to the expression of the physical,
moral, and spiritual nature of the god. The god was
just that, and there was nothing behind, and, as the
ancient enthusiast avers, " having once seen him thus,
you could not imagine him otherwise." But when a
divinity to whom high religious conceptions have
already come to attach is presented, as it might be
in Egyptian religious art, with the head of a jackal or
an ape, the feeling is certain to arise sooner or later in
the mind of the worshipper that the sense-form is
inadequate to the idea. Then his troubled questioning
will receive a mystic answer, and the animal type of
godhead will be given an esoteric interpretation.
Plutarch, in the De Iside et Osiride, 1 is one of
our witnesses. He finds a profounder significance for
theosophy in the beetle, the asp, and the weasel than
in the most beautiful anthropomorphic work of bronze
or marble. He here turns his back on his ancestors,
and goes over to the sect of the Egyptian mystic.
But the most curious testimony to my thesis is
borne by an inscription on an Egyptian lamp an
invocation of the God Thoth : "0 Father of Light,
O Word (Aoyo) that orderest day and night, come
show thyself to me. O God of Gods, in thy ape-form
enter." 2 Here the association of so mystic a concept
as the " Logos," the divine Reason, an emanation of
God with the form of an ape, is striking enough, and
suggests to us many reflections on the contrast between
the Egyptian theriomorphism and the human idolatry
of the Greek. The Hermes of Praxiteles was too stubborn
a fact before the people's eyes to fade or to soar into
1 P. 382, c.
2 Vide Petrie, in Transactions of Congress of the History of Religions,
1908, vol. i. p. 192.
16 GREECE AND BABYLON
the high vagueness of the " Logos," too stable in his
beautiful humanity to sink into the ape.
But before leaving this subject I would point out a
phenomenon in the Hellenic world that shows the
working of the same principle. The Orphic god
Dionysos-Sabazios-Zagreus was vroKvpoptpos, a shape-
shifter, conceived now as bull, now as serpent, now
as man, and the Orphic sects were penetrated with
a mystic theosophy ; and, again, they were a foreign
element embedded in Greek society and religion.
While we were dealing with the subject of anthropo-
morphism, we should consider also the question of sex,
for a religion that gives predominance to the god is
certain to differ in some essential respects from one in
which a goddess is supreme. Now, although the con-
ception of an All-Father was a recognised belief in
every Greek community, and theoretically Zeus was
admitted to be the highest god, yet we may believe
Athena counted more than he for the Athenians, and
Hera more for the Argives. And we have evidence
of the passionate devotion of many urban and village
communities to the mother Demeter and her daughter
Kore, to whom the greatest mysteries of Greece, full
of the promise of posthumous salvation, were conse-
crated. Also, in the adjacent lands of earlier culture
we mark the same phenomenon. In Egyptian religion
we have the commanding figure of Isis, who, though
by no means supreme in the earlier period, seems to
dominate the latter age of this polytheism. In the
Assyrian-Babylonian Pantheon, though the male deity
is at the head, Ishtar appears as his compeer, or as
inferior only to Asshur. Coming westward towards
Asia Minor, we seem to see the goddess overshadowing
the god. On the great Hittite monument at Boghaz-
INAUGURAL LECTURE 17
Keui, in Cappadocia, skilfully interpreted by Dr. Frazer,
we observe a great goddess with her son coequal with the
Father-God. In the lands adjacent to the coast a
Mother-Goddess, sometimes also imagined as virgin,
Kybele of Phrygia, Ma of Cappadocia, Hipta of Lydia,
Astarte of Askalon, Artemis of Ephesos who was pro-
bably a blend of Hellenic and Oriental cult-ideas,
appears to have been dominant from an immemorial
antiquity ; and Sir Arthur Evans has discovered the
same mysterious feminine power pre-eminent in the
Minoan religion. We may even affirm that she has
ruled a great part of the Mediterranean down to the
present day.
The various questions suggested by this predominance
of goddess-worship are fascinating and subtle. The
sociological one how far it is to be connected with a
system of counting descent through the female, with a
matrilinear society I have partly discussed elsewhere. 1
I may later be able to enter on the question that
is of more interest for the psychology of religion
the effect of such worships on the religious sentiment.
Here I can merely point to the phenomenon as a natural
and logical product of the principle of anthropomorphism,
but would call attention to the fact that in the East
it sometimes developed into a form that, from the
anthropomorphic point of view, must be called morbid
and subversive of this principle ; for the rivalry of
divine sex was here and there solved by the fusion
of the two natures in the divinity, and we find a bisexual
type a male Astarte, a bearded Ishtar. 2 The healthy-
minded anthropomorphism of the Hellene rejects this
Oriental extravagance.
1 Archiv fur Religionswissenschaft, 1904.
2 Vide Jastrow, Religion Babyloniens u, Assyrians, vol. i. p. 545.
2,
i8 GREECE AND BABYLON
If we now could consider in detail the various moral
conceptions attached to the high State divinities of
Greece and the East, we should be struck with a general
similarity in the point of view of the various culture-
stocks. The higher deities, on the whole, are ethical
beings who favour the righteous and punish transgressors ;
and the worship of Greece falls here into line with the
Hebraic conceptions of a god of righteousness. But in
one important particular Hellenic thought markedly
differs from Oriental, especially the Persian. In the
people's religion throughout Hellas the deities are, on the
whole, worshipped as beneficent, as doing good to their
worshippers, so long as these do not offend or sin against
them. The apparent exceptions are no real exceptions.
Ares may have been regarded as an evil god by the poet
or the philosopher, but we cannot discover that this
was ever the view of the people who cared to establish
his cult. The Erinyes are vindictive ; nevertheless,
they are moral, and the struggle between them and
Apollo in the Aeschylean drama is only the contest
between a more barbaric and a more civilised morality.
In the list of Greek divine titles and appellatives, only
one or two at most can be given a significance of evil.
Doubtless, beneath the bright anthropomorphic
religion lurked a fear of ghosts and evil spirits, and the
later days of Hellenic paganism were somewhat clouded
with demonology. But the average Greek protected
himself sufficiently by purification and easy conventional
.magic. He did not brood on the principle of evil or
personify it as a great cosmic power, and therefore
he would not naturally evolve a system of religious
dualism, though the germs from which this might grow
may be found in Orphic tradition and doctrine. Con-
trast this with the evidence from Egypt, Assyria, and
INAUGURAL LECTURE 19
Persia. The Egyptian and Assyrian records bear
strong impress of the prominence and power of the
belief in evil spirits. The high gods of Assyria were
continually being invoked and implored by the wor-
shipper to save him from the demons, and one of these,
Ira, a demon of pestilence, seems to have received
actual worship ; and much of Egyptian private ritual
was protective magic against them.
But nowhere did the power of evil assume such grand
proportions as in the old Mazdean creed of Persia, and
the dualism between the good and evil principle became
here the foundation of a great religion that spread its
influence wide through the West. The religion had its
prophet, Zarathustra, in whose historic reality we ought
not to doubt. In his system the faithful Mazdean is
called upon to play his part in the struggle between
Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu, and this struggle con-
tinues through the ages till in the final cataclysm the
Daevas, or evil demons, will be overthrown. We note
here that this faith includes the idea of a final Judgment,
so familiar to Judaic and Christian thought, but scarcely
to be found in the native Hellenic religion. Further,
it should be observed that the Mazdean dualism between
good and evil has nothing in common with the Platonic
antithesis between mind and sense, or St. Paul's between
spirit and flesh, or with the hatred of the body that is
expressed in Buddhism. The good Mazdean might
regard his body as good and pure, and therefore he
escaped, as by a different way did the Greek, from the
tyranny of a morbid ascetisrn. Only he developed
the doctrine of purity into a code more burdensome
than can be found, I think, elsewhere. The ideas of
ritual-purity on which he framed this code are found
broadcast through the East and in Egypt, and appear
20 GREECE AND BABYLON
in the Hellenic religion also. The Greek, however,
did not allow himself to be oppressed by his own
cathartic system, but turned it to excellent service in
the domain of law, as I have tried to show elsewhere. 1
Generally, as regards the association of religion and
morality, we find this to be always intimate in the more
developed races, but our statistics are insufficient for us
to determine with certainty the comparative strength of
the religious sanction of morals in the ancient societies
of the Mediterranean. The ethical-religious force of the
Zarathustrian faith seems to approach that of the
Hebraic. We should judge it to be stronger, at least,
than any that was exercised in Hellas, for Hellas, outside
the Orphic sects, had neither sacred books of universal
recognition nor a prophet. Yet all Hellenic morality
was protected by religion, and the Delphic oracle, which
occasionally was able to play the part of the father-
confessor, encouraged a high standard of conduct as
high as the average found elsewhere in the ancient
world. We may note, however, one lacuna in the
Hellenic code : neither Greek ethics, on the whole,
nor Greek religion, emphasised or exalted or deified the
virtue of truth ; but we hear of a goddess of Truth
in Egypt, and it becomes a cardinal tenet and a divine
force in the Zarathustrian ideal.
Again, in all ancient societies religion is closely inter-
woven with political, legal, and social institutions, and
its influence on these concerns the history of the evolution
of society and law. It is only in modern society, or in
a few most ideal creeds at periods of great exaltation,
that a severance is made between Csesar and God. Save
Buddhism, the religions of the ancient societies of the
East and of Egypt were all in a sense political. Darius
1 Vide my Evolution of Religion, pp. 139-152,
INAUGURAL LECTURE 21
regards himself as specially protected by Ahura-Mazda,
and we are told by Herodotus l that in the private
Persian's prayers no separate personal benefits were
besought, but only the welfare of the King and the
Persian community. The gods of Assyria inspire counsel
and order the campaign ; Shamash, the sun-god, is
" Just Ruler " and the " Lord of Law " ; and Ninib
is styled the god " who lays for ever the foundation-stone
of the State/' and who, like Zeus opiog, and the Latin
Terminus, " protects the boundaries of the cornfield/'
The Syrian goddess of Bambyke, Kybele of Phrygia,
Astarte of Askalon, all wear the mural crown, the badge
of the city goddess. But I doubt if our materials are
as yet rich enough to inform us in what precise way
religion played a constructive part in the oldest
civilisations, namely, those of Assyria and Egypt.
We may observe that the code of Hammurabi, our
oldest legal document, is curiously secular and in many
respects modern.
The question can be most fruitfully pursued in the
study of the Greek societies ; for no other religion of
which we have any record was so political as the Hellenic,
not even, as I should judge, the Roman, to which it bears
the closest resemblance in this respect. The very origin
of the nokig, the city-state, was often religious ; for the
name or title of the deity often gave a name to the city,
and the temple was in this case probably the centre of
the earliest residence. In the organised and complex
Greek societies, every institution of the State the as-
sembly, the council, the law-courts, the agrarian economy,
all the regulations of the family and clan were conse-
crated and safeguarded by the supervision of some deity.
Often he or she was worshipped as in a literal sense the
1 1. 132.
22 GREECE AND BABYLON
State ancestor, and in one of the temples might be found
burning the perpetual fire which symbolised the per-
manence of the city's life. And in Greece we find a
unique phenomenon, which, though small, is of great
significance the deity might here and there be made
to take the office and title of a civic magistrate. For
instance, Apollo was mpai^popos in Asia Minor cities,
and in the later days of Sparta, as the recent excavations
have shown, the ghost of Lykourgos was elected as the
chief inspector of the education of the young.
To the superficial observer, then, the Greek civic
society might appear a theocracy. But such a view
would imply ignorance of the average character of the
ancient Greek world. There can be no theocracy where
there is no theocrat. In Asia Minor the priest might
be a great political power, but in Greece this was never
so. Here the political, secular, utilitarian interest
dominates the religion. The high divinities become
politicians, and immersed in secular affairs, and even
take sides in the party strife, as some of the religious
titles attest. Thus Greek religion escaped morbidity
and insanity, becoming genial and human, and com-
pensating by its adaptability to the common needs of
social life for what it lacked of mystery and aloofness.
Therefore, also, in Greek invocations and hymns we
do not often hear the echo of that sublimity that
resounds in the Iranian, Assyrian, and still more in the
Hebrew liturgies.
Another interesting point of comparison is the
relation of religion to the arts and sciences. Their
association may be said to have been more intimate in
Hellenism than it has been found to be in any other
creed. We can estimate what music and the drama
owed to Apollo and Dionysos, and how the life of the
INAUGURAL LECTURE 23
philosopher, artist, and poet was considered consecrated
to certain divinities. We hear of the Delphic oracle
encouraging philosophic pursuits. The name " Museum "
is a landmark in the religious history of education, and
we know that the temple of Asklepios in Kos was the
cradle of the school of modern medicine. The records
of the other religions of this area show glimpses of
the same association, and more extended research may
throw further light on it. The Babylonian gods Nebo
and Ea were divinities of wisdom and the arts, and to the
former, who was the inventor of writing, the library of
Ashurbanapal was consecrated. Chaldean astronomy
was evolved from their astrology, which was itself a
religious system. But demonology was stronger in
Assyria, Persia, and Egypt than in Hellas, and demon-
ology is the foe of science. In the Zend-Avesta the
priestly medicine-man, who heals by spell and exorcism,
is ranked higher than the scientific practitioner. A
chapter might be written on the negative advantages
of Greek religion, and none was of greater moment
than this that it had no sacred books or authoritative
religious cosmogony to oppose to the dawn and the
development of scientific inquiry. Asklepios had been
a practitioner in the method of thaumaturgic cures, but
he accepted Hippokrates genially when the time came.
As regards the relation between Greek philosophy
and Greek religion, something may remain to be dis-
covered by any scholar who is equally familiar with
both. It would be absurd to attempt to summarise
the facts in a few phrases here. I wish merely to
indicate the absence in pure Hellenic speculation of
any elaborated system of theosophy, such as the late
Egyptian " gnosis," till we come to Neo-Platonism,
when the Greek intellect is no longer pure. We discover
24 GREECE AND BABYLON
also a vacuum in the religious mind and nomenclature
of the earlier Greek : he had neither the concept nor
any name to express the concept of what we call
" faith/ 3 the intellectual acceptance and confessional
affirmation of certain dogmas concerning the divinity ;
and in this respect he differed essentially not only
from the Christian, but also from the Iranian and
Buddhistic votary.
A great part of the study of ancient religion is a study
of ritual, and it is interesting to survey the Mediterranean
area, so as to discern similarities or divergencies in the
forms of religious service. Everywhere we observe the
blood-sacrifice of animals, and very frequently the harm-
less offering of fruits and cereals, and now one, now the
other, in Greece as elsewhere, was regarded as the more
pious. The former is of the higher interest, for certain
ideas which have been constructive of higher religions
our own, for example have grown out of it. At first
sight the animal oblation seems everywhere much the
same in character and significance. The sacrificial ritual
of Leviticus does not differ in any essential trait from
that which commended itself to the Greeks and the other
peoples of these lands. Certain animals are everywhere
offered, at times as a free and cheerful gift, at other
times as an atonement to expiate sin and to deprecate
wrath. Certain other animals are tabooed, for reasons
that may repay searching out.
In most regions we have evidence of the practice of
human sacrifice, either as an established system or as an
occasional expedient. The motives that prompted it
present an important and intricate question to the
modern inquirer. The two nations that grew to abhor
it and to protest against it were the Hebrew and the
Greek, though the latter did not wholly escape the taint
INAUGURAL LECTURE 25
of it ; for he had inherited the practice from his
ancestral past, and he found it indigenous in the lands
he conquered. Repellent as the rite may be, it much
concerns the study of the religions of the cultured races.
Now, an interesting theory concerning sacrifice was
expounded and brought into prominent discussion by
Professor Robertson Smith in his Religion of the Semites,
and in an earlier article in the Encyclopedia Britannica
namely, that a certain type of ancient sacrifice was a
mystic sacramental communion, the worshipper par-
taking of some sacred food or drink in which the
spirit of the deity was temporarily lodged. This mystic
act, of which there is no clear trace in the Old Testament,
is reported from Egypt, 1 and it appears to have been
part of the Attis ritual of Phrygia. We find doubtful
traces of it in the Eleusinian and Samothracian mysteries ;
also a glimpse of it here and there in the public religion
of Hellas. But it is best attested as a potent force in
the Dionysiac worship, especially in a certain savage
ritual that we may call Thracian, but also in the refined
and Hellenised service as well.
I cannot dwell here on the various aspects of this
problem. The Hellenic statistics and their significance
I have partly collected and estimated in a paper pub-
lished some years ago. 2 The application of the sacra-
mental idea to the explanation of the Eleusinian
mysteries, ingeniously attempted by Dr. Jevons, I
have discussed in the third volume of my Cults of the
Greek States ; and the Dionysiac communion-service
is considered at length in the fifth.
The attractiveness of the mystic appeal of the
1 Transactions of Congress of History of Religions, 1908, vol. i.
p. 192.
2 Hibbert Journal, 1904, " Sacrificial Communion in Greek Religion."
26 GREECE AND BABYLON
Sacrament appears to have increased in the later days
of paganism, especially in its period of struggle with
Christianity. That strangest rite of the expiring
polytheism, the rwpofifaov, or the baptism in bull's blood,
in the worship of Kybele, has been successfully traced
back by M. Cumont to the worship of the Babylonian
Anaitis. The sacramental concept was the stronghold
of Mithraism, but can hardly be regarded as part of its
heritage from Persia, for it does not seem to have been
familiar to the Iranian religion nor to the Vedic Indian.
In fact, the religious history of no other Aryan race
discloses it with clearness, save that of the Thraco-
Phrygian and Hellenic. Was it, then, a special product
of ancient " Mediterranean " religious thought? It
would be important to know, and Crete may one day
be able to tell us, whether King Minos took the sacrament.
Meantime, I would urge upon those who are studying
this phenomenon in the various religions the necessity
of precise definition, so as to distinguish the different
grades of the sacramental concept, for loose state-
ments are somewhat rife about it.
Apart from the ritual of the altar, there is another
mode of attaining mystic union with the divinity
namely, by means of a sacred marriage or simulated
corporeal union. This is suggested by the initiation
formula of the mysteries of Attis-Kybele. The cult of
Kybele was connected with that of the Minoan goddess,
and the strange legend of Pasiphae and the bull-
god lends itself naturally to this interpretation. The
Hellenic religion also presents us with a few examples
of the holy marriage of the human bride with the god,
the most notable being the annual ceremony of the
union of the " Queen/' the wife of the King Archon,
at -Athens, with Dionysos. And in the mysteries of
INAUGURAL LECTURE 27
later paganism, as well as in certain forms and symbolism
of early Christianity, Professor Dieterich has traced the
surviving influence of this rite.
Among all the phenomena of ritual, none are more
interesting or in their effects more momentous than the
rites that are associated with the dogma of the death of
the divinity. That the high gods are naturally mortal
and liable to death is an idea that is certainly rare,
though it may be found in Egyptian and old Teutonic
mythology ; but the dogma of the annual or periodic
death and resurrection of the divinity has been, and is,
enacted in much peasant ritual, and worked for the
purposes of agrarian magic in Europe and elsewhere.
More rarely we find the belief attached to the mystic
forms and faith of some advanced religion, and it is
specially in the Mediterranean area where it appears
in a high stage of development. It is a salient feature
of the Egyptian worship of Isis ; of the Sumerian-
Babylonian ritual, in which the dead Thammuz was
bewailed, and which penetrated Syria and other parts
of Asia Minor ; of the worship of Attis and Adonis in
Phrygia and the Lebanon ; and of certain shrines of
the Oriental Aphrodite. It is associated often with
orgiastic sorrow and ecstatic joy, and with the belief
in human immortality of which the resurrection of the
deity is the symbol and the efficacious means. This
idea and this ritual appears to have been alien to the
native Hellenic religion. The Hellenic gods and god-
desses do not die and rise again.
Only in one Aryan nation of antiquity, so far as I am
aware, was the idea clear and operative the Thraco-
Phrygian, in the religion of Dionysos-Sabazios. This
alien cult, when transplanted into Greece, retained still
some savagery in the rite that enacted the death of the
28 GREECE AND BABYLON
god ; but in the Orphic sects the ritual idea was developed
into a doctrine of posthumous salvation, from which the
later pre-Christian world drew spiritual comfort and some
fertile moral conceptions. This Thradan-Dionysiac in-
fluence in Hellas, though chastened and sobered by the
sanity of the national temperament, initiated the Hellene
into a certain spiritual mood that was not naturally
evoked by the native religion ; for it brought into his
polytheism a higher measure of enthusiasm, a more
ecstatic spirit of self-abandonment, than it possessed by
its own traditional bent. Many civilised religions appear
to have passed beyond the phase of orgiastic fervour.
It emerges in the old Egyptian ritual, and most power-
fully in the religion of Phrygia and of certain districts
of Syria ; but it seems to have been alien to the higher
Semitic and the Iranian religions, as it was to the
native Hellenic.
I have only been able here, without argument or
detailed exposition, to present a short summary of the
more striking phenomena in the religious systems of our
spiritual ancestors. Many of the problems I have
stated still invite further research, which may con-
siderably modify our theories. I claim that the subject
possesses a masterful interest both in its own right and
for the light it sheds on ancient philosophy, ancient
art, and ancient institutions. And it ought in the
future to attract more and more the devotion of some
of our post-graduate students. Much remains to be done
even for the Hellenic and Roman religions, still more for
those of Egypt and Assyria, Here, in our University
of Oxford, under whose auspices the Sacred Books of
the East were translated, and where the equipment for
the study is at least equal to that of any other centre
of learning, this appeal ought not to be made in vain.
CHAPTER II.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM AND THE EVIDENCE.
THE subject I have chosen for this course may appear
over-ambitious ; and the attempt to pass critical judg-
ment upon the facts .that arise in this wide comparative
survey may be thought premature. For not only is
the area vast, but large tracts of it are still unexplored,
while certain regions have yielded materials that are
ample and promising, but of which the true interpreta-
tion has not yet been found. We have, for instance,
abundant evidence flowing in with ever-increasing
volume of the Sumerian-Babylonian religion, but only
a portion of the cuneiform texts has as yet been
authoritatively translated and made available for
the service of Comparative Religion. The Hittite
monuments are witnesses of primary value concerning
Hittite religion : but the Hittite script may reveal
much more that is vital to our view of it, and without
the help of that script we are not sure of the exact
interpretation of those religious monuments ; but
though we have recently heard certain encouraging
expressions of hope, the master-word has not yet been
found that can open the door to this buried treasure
of knowledge. And again, the attempt to gauge accu-
rately the relation and the indebtedness of Greek religion
to that of the near East cannot be wholly successful,
until we know more of the Minoan-Mycenaean religion ;
3 o GREECE AND BABYLON
and our hope hangs here partly on the discovery of
more monuments, but mainly, I am convinced, on the
decipherment of the mysterious Minoan writing, to
which great achievement Sir Arthur Evans' recent work
on the Scripta Minoa is a valuable contribution.
Therefore the time is certainly not yet ripe for a final
and authoritative pronouncement on the great questions
that I am venturing upon in this course.
But even the early premature attempts to solve a
problem may contribute something to the ultimate satisfy-
ing solution. And often in the middle of our investiga-
tions, when new evidence continues to pour in, there
comes a moment when it is desirable to look around
and take stock, so to speak, to consider whether we can
draw some general conclusions with safety, or in what
direction the facts appear at this stage to be pointing.
In regard to the religions of anterior Asia and South-
Eastern Europe, and the question of their relation-
ships, this is now, I feel, a seasonable thing to do
all the more because the Asiatic region has been mainly
explored by specialists, who have worked, as was profit-
able and right, each in his special province, without
having the time or perhaps the training to achieve
a comparative survey of the whole. We know also by
long experience the peculiar dangers to which specialists
are prone ; in their enthusiastic devotion to their own
domain, they are apt to believe that it supplies them
with the master-key whereby to unlock many other
secret places of human history. This hope, soon to
prove an illusion, was regnant when the interpretation
of the Sacred Vedic Books was first accomplished.
And now certain scholars, who are distinguished speci-
alists in Assyriology, are putting forward a similar claim
for Babylon, and are championing the view that the
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM AND EVIDENCE 31
Sumerian- Assyrian religion and culture played a domin-
ating part in the evolution of the Mediterranean
civilisation, and that therefore much of the religious
beliefs and practices of the early Greeks and other
European stocks must be traced back to Mesopotamia
as their fountain-head. 1 This will be encouraging to
that distinguished writer on Greek religion, Dr. O.
Gruppe, who almost a generation ago proclaimed in his
Griechische Mythologie the dogma of the emanation of
all religion from a single centre, and the dependence of
Greece upon the near East.
Now there ought to be no prejudice a priori against
such a theory, which stands on a different footing from
what I may call the Vedic fallacy : and it is childish
to allow to the Aryan, or any other racial bias, any
malignant influence in these difficult discussions. Those
who have worked for years upon the marvellously rich
records of Mesopotamian culture, whether at first hand
or, like myself, at second hand, cannot fail to receive the
deepest impression of its imperial grandeur and its force-
ful vitality, and of its intensity of thought and purpose
in the sphere of religion. Naturally, they may feel,
such spiritual power must have radiated influence far
and wide over the adjacent lands ; and no one could
maintain that South-Eastern Europe was too remote
to have been touched, perhaps penetrated, by it. For
we know that, under certain conditions, the race-barrier
falls down before the march of a conquering and dominat-
ing religion. And now, in the new light of a wider
historical survey, instead of saying, as once was said,
" What is more its own than a people's gods ? " we
1 Vide the critical remarks on such a view by Prof. Jastrow in
Transactions of the Third International Congress of the History of
Religions, vol. i. pp. 234-237.
32 GREECE AND BABYLON
may rather ask, " What is less its own than a people's
gods ? " always, however, remembering that race-
tradition, inherited instinctive feeling and thought, is
very strong in these matters, and that a people will,
often unconsciously, cling to its ancestral modes of
religious consciousness and expression, while it will
freely borrow alien forms, names, and ritual.
The inquiry indicated by the title of these lectures
is naturally twofold ; it may be applied either to
the earlier or the later periods of the Hellenic and
Hellenic-Roman history. The question concerning the
later period, though much critical research is needed for
its clear solution, is far simpler and more hopeful : for
the evidence is immeasurably fuller and more precise,
and historical dates and landmarks are there to help.
The history of the invasion of the West by Mithraism
has been masterfully stated by Cumont ; the general
influence of the Anatolian religions upon Graeco-Roman
society is presented and estimated by the same writer in
his Religious Orientates; by Toutain, in his Les Cuttes
Paiens dans I' Empire Remain; by our own scholar,
Samuel Dill, in Roman Society in the last Century
of the Western Empire ; and more summarily by Salomon
Reinach in his Orpheus. Therefore I am not going to
pursue the inquiry at this end, although I may have to
notice and use some of the later evidence. I am going
to praise the question concerning the very origins of the
Hellenic religious system, so as to test the recently pro-
claimed dogma of certain Assyriologists, and to determine,
if possible, whether the Orient played any formative
part in the organic development of Greek religion. For
this is just the question which, I venture to maintain,
has never yet been critically explored. From what
I have said at the beginning, it is obvious that I cannot
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM AND EVIDENCE 33
promise final and proved results. It will be gain
enough if we can dimly discern something behind the
veil that shrouds the origins of things, can reach to
something that has the air of a reasoned scientific
hypothesis, and still more if we can indicate the paths
along which one day light may come.
We may then begin at once with stating more clearly
what are the necessary conditions for a successful
solution of the problem. First, we must accomplish a
thorough exploration of the religions of the Anatolian
and Mesopotamian lands ; secondly, we must explore
the Minoan-Mycenaean religion, and estimate the
strength of its influence on the later period ; thirdly, we
must be able to decide what beliefs and practices the
Hellenes brought with them from the North ; lastly,
before we can hope for any precision in our results, we
must be able to answer with some degree of accuracy
a burning chronological question : What was the date
of the arrival through the Balkans from the North of
those Aryan-speaking tribes that by mingling with the
Southerners formed the Hellenic people of history ?
For only then shall we be able to test the whole question,
by considering the position of the Eastern powers at
this momentous epoch. The third of these inquiries,
concerning the aboriginal religious ideas of the earliest
Aryan Hellenes, is perhaps the most troublesome of all.
I may venture upon it at a later occasion, but it is
far too difficult and extensive to combine it with the
others in a short treatise. Nor can I do more than
touch lightly on the Minoan-Mycenaean period ; for I
wish to devote the greater part of these lectures to the
comparative survey of Greece, Anatolia, and Mesopo-
tamia, as this task has never yet been critically per-
formed. Something like an attempt was made by
3
34 GREECE AND BABYLON
Tiele in his Histoire des anciennes Religions, but when
that book was written much of the most important
evidence had not yet come in.
But before beginning the exploration of any large
area, whether for the purposes of Comparative Religion,
archaeology, or anthropology, we must possess or acquire
certain data of ethnography and secular history. We
must, for instance, face the chronological question that
I mentioned just above, before we can estimate the
formative influences at work in the earliest phases of
Hellenic development. Recent archaeological evidence,
which I cannot here discuss, renders us valuable aid at
this critical point of our inquiry. We can no longer
relegate the earliest Hellenic invasion of Greece to a very
remote period of Mediterranean history. The arguments
from the Minoan culture, combined with the still more
striking evidence, of which the value is not yet fully
appreciated, obtained by the recent excavations of the
British School on the soil of Thessaly, 1 point to the
conviction that this, the epoch-making event of the
world's secular and spiritual life, occurred not much
earlier than 1500 B.C. On this hypothesis, our quest
becomes less vague. We can consider what influences
were likely to be radiating from the East upon the
opposite shores of the Aegean during those few centuries,
in which the Hellenic tribes were passing from barbar-
ism to culture, and the religious beliefs and ritual
were developing into that comparatively advanced and
complex form of polytheism which is presented about
1000 B.C. in the Homeric poems. By this date we may
assert that the Hellenic spirit had evolved certain definite
traits and had acquired a certain autonomous power.
While continuing always to be quickly responsive to
1 Vide Annual of the British School, 1909, 1910.
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM AND EVIDENCE 35
alien influence, it would not henceforth admit the alien
product with the submissive and infantine docility of
barbarians In fact, when we compare the Homeric
religion with that of the fifth century, we feel that in
this particular sphere of the social and spiritual life
the Hellene in many essentials had already come to his
own in the Homeric period. Therefore, in trying to
track the earliest streams of influences that moulded
his religious consciousness, what was operative before
the tenth century is of more primary importance than
what was at work upon him afterwards.
Now the most recent researches into Mesopotamian
history establish with certainty the conclusion that
there was no direct political contact possible between
the powers in the valley of the Euphrates and the western
shores of the Aegean, in the second millennium B.C. It
is true that the first Tiglath-Pileser, near the end of the
twelfth century, extended the Assyrian arms to the
shores of South-Eastern Asia, to Cilicia and Phoenicia 1 ;
but there does not seem to have been any permanent
Assyrian or Babylonian settlement on this littoral.
The city of Sinope in the north, which, as the legend
attests and the name that must be derived from the
Assyrian god Sin indicates, was originally an Assyrian
colony, was probably of later foundation, and geographic-
ally too remote to count for the present inquiry. In
fact, between the nascent Hellas and the great world
of Mesopotamia, there were powerful and possibly
independent strata of cultures interposing. We have
to reckon first with the great Hittite Kingdom, which
included Cappadocia and Northern Syria, and was in
close touch with Phrygia and many of the communities
1 Vide Zimmern, Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament (K. A.T.) S ,
PP-
36 GREECE AND BABYLON
of the shore-line of Asia Minor ; and which at the period
of the Tel-el-Amarna correspondence was in diplomatic
relations and on terms of equality with the Assyrian
and Egyptian powers. And the tendency of modern
students, such as Messerschmidt in his Die Hettiter,
is to extend this ethnic name so as to include practically
all the Anatolian peoples who were other than the
Aryan and Semitic stocks. As far as I can discern,
at the present stage of our knowledge this is unscientific ;
and it is at present safer to regard the pre-Aryan in-
habitants of the Troad, Phrygia, Lycia, Caria, and
Lydia, possibly Cilicia, as varieties of an ancient Medi-
terranean stock to which the people of the Minoan-
Aegean culture themselves belonged. At any rate,
for the purposes of our religious comparison, they are to
be counted as a third stratum, through which as through
the Hittite the stream of influence from Mesopotamia
would be obliged to percolate before it could discharge
itself upon the Hellenic world. And these interjacent
peoples are races of great mental gifts and force ; they
were not likely to transmit the Mesopotamian influence
pure and unmingled with currents of their own religious
life.
Therefore this great problem of old-world religion
is no light one ; and fallacies here can only be avoided
by the most critical intelligence trained on the best
method of comparative religious study. We must
endeavour to seize and comprehend the most essential
and characteristic features of the Babylonian-Assyrian
cults and theology; we must discover all that is at
present possible, and trust to the future for discovering
more, concerning the Hittite religion ; and then we
must glean all we can of the earliest forms of cult in
vogue among the other peoples of the Asia-Minor coast,
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM AND EVIDENCE 37
and in the early world of the Minoan-Mycenaean
culture.
And if the phenomena of this area present us with
certain general resemblances to the Hellenic, we must
not too hastily assume that the West has borrowed
from the East. For often in comparing the most
remote regions of the world we are struck with strange
similarities of myth and cult ; and, where the possibility
of borrowing is ruled out, we must have recourse to the
theory of spontaneous generation working in obedience
to similar psychical forces. The hypothesis of borrow-
ing, which is always legitimate where the peoples with
whom we are concerned are adjacent, is only raised to
proof either when the linguistic evidence is clear, for
instance when the divine names or the names of cult-
objects are the same in the various districts, or when
the points of resemblance in ritual or religious concept
are numerous, striking, and fundamental, or peculiar to
the communities of a certain area. This is all the more
necessary to insist on, because many superficial points
of resemblance will be found in all religions that are at
the same stage of development.
Now, in beginning this wide comparative survey,
one's first difficulty is to arrange the material in such
a way as to enable one to present a comparison that
shall be definite and crucial. It would be useless to
attempt a mere synoptical outline of the Babylonian-
Sumerian religion ; those whom that might content
will find one in Dr. Pinches' handbook, The Religion
of Babylonia and Assyria, or Mr. King's Babylonian Re-
ligion, while those who desire a more thorough and
detailed presentation of it will doubtless turn to the
laborious and critical volumes of Prof. Jastrow, Die
Religion Balyloniens u. Assyrians. But for me to
38 GREECE AND BABYLON
try to present this complex polytheism en bloc would be
useless in view of my present object ; for two elaborate
religious systems cannot effectively be compared en bloc.
A more hopeful method for those who have to pass
cursorily over a great area, is to select certain salient
and essential features separately, and to see how, in
regard to each one, the adjacent religious systems agree
or differ. And the method I propose to pursue through-
out this course is as follows : Ignoring the embryology
of the subject, that is to say, all discussions about the
genesis of religious forms and ideas that would contribute
nothing to our purpose, I will try to define the mor-
phology of the Mesopotamian and Anatolian religions ;
and will first compare them with the Hellenic in respect
of the element of personality in the divine perception,
the tendency to, or away from, anthropomorphism,
the relation of the deities to the natural world, to the
State, and to morality, and I will consider what we
can deduce from the study of the famous law-code
of Hammurabi. A special question will arise concern-
ing the supremacy of the goddess, a phenomenon which
may be of some importance as a clue in our whole
inquiry. The comparison will then be applied to the
religious psychology of the different peoples ; and
here it will be useful to analyse and define that element
of the religious temper which we call fanaticism, and
which sometimes affords one of the crucial distinctions
between one religion and another.
We may also obtain evidence from a comparison
of the cosmogonic ideas prevalent over this area, so far
as the records reveal any, as well as of the eschatological
beliefs concerning man's future destiny and his posthum-
ous existence. Finally, we must compare the various
cult-objects and forms of ritual, the significance of the
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM AND EVIDENCE 39
sacrifice ; the position and organisation of the priest-
hood ; and here it will be convenient to consider the
ritual of magic as well as of the higher service and the
part played by magic within the limits of the higher
religion. If under each of these heads we have been
able to discover certain salient points of divergence
or resemblance between the Hellene and the Mesopo-
tamian, we may be able to draw a general deduction of
some probability concerning the whole question. In
any case we may be encouraged by the assurance that
the comparison of two complex and highly developed
religions is fruitful and interesting in itself, whether it
yields us definite historical conclusions or not.
CHAPTER III,
THE MORPHOLOGY OF THE COMPARED RELIGIONS.
As I said in a previous lecture, 1 " we must regard the
religious structure to which the cults of Anatolia and
Mesopotamia belonged as morphologically the same
as the Hellenic/ 1 The grounds of this judgment may
be now briefly shown. In his Historie des anciennes
Religions, Tiele classifies most of these together under
the category of Nature-Religions, which he distinguishes
from the ethical : he is thinking of the distinction
between that religious view in which the divinity is
closely associated, or even identified, with some natural
object, and that in which the divinity is a moral being
merely, stript of all attributes that are derived from
the world of nature. Serious objection may be taken
to the terms in which this classification of religions is
expressed. The only religions which would fall under
the ethical class would be the Judaic, the Moslem, and
the Christian : and yet the Hebrews in the most exalted
period of their religion prayed to their god for rain
and crops, and the Christian Churches do the same to
this day. A deity whose interest is purely ethical has
only existed in certain philosophic systems : he has
never had an established cult. On the other hand,
a nature-religion, at the stage when personal deities
have been somewhat developed, which is not also
1 Vide supra, p. 9.
40
MORPHOLOGY OF COMPARED RELIGIONS 41
noral, has yet to be discovered. Religion, in its origin
3ossibly non-moral, must, as society advances, acquire
:he closest relations with the social moral code. A
Sun-god or Thunder-god Shamash, for instance, of
Babylon, Mithras of Persia, Sol Invictus of the later
Roman Empire may become a great divinity of an
ethical cult and yet retain his association with the
element. And it is fruitless to classify higher religions
at least on such a basis of distinction as " moral " and
" non-moral/' l
It is more to the purpose of our present comparison
to employ as one of our test-standards the degree of
personality in the cult-objects of the different races.
Is the popular imagination still on the level of animism
which engenders mere vaguely conceived daimones,
shadowy agents, working perhaps in amorphous groups,
without fixed names or local habitations or special
individuality ? Or has it reached that stage of religious
perception at which personal deities emerge, concrete
individualities clothed with special attributes, physical,
moral, spiritual ? The most superficial study of the
cuneiform texts and the religious monuments of the
Sumerian-Babylonian society does not leave us in
doubt how we should answer these questions in behalf
of the peoples in the Mesopotamian valley. When
the Semitic tribes first pushed their way into these
regions, swarming probably, as usual, from Arabia, at
some remotely early date, they found there the non-
Semitic Sumerian people possessed of a highly complex
religious pantheon. Bringing with them their own
Shamash the sun-god, Adad the storm-god, and the
1 Westermarck maintains the view in his Origin and Development
of Moral Ideas, pp. 663-664, that in many savage religions the gods
have no concern with ordinary morality ; but the statistics he gives
need careful testing.
42 GREECE AND BABYLON
great goddess Ishtar, and perhaps other divinities, they
nevertheless took over the whole Sumerian pantheon,
with its elaborate liturgy of hymns and incantations ;
and for the record of this great and fascinating hieratic
literature the Sumerian language with interlinear
Babylonian-Assyrian paraphrase was preserved down
to the beginning of our era. This religious system of
dateless antiquity suffered little change "from the
drums and tramplings " of all the conquerors from the
time of Sargon ist and the kings before Hammurabi to
the day of the Macedonian Seleukos. And in a sketch
of this system as it prevailed in the second millennium B.C.
it is quite useless for our purpose to try to distinguish
between Sumerian and Semitic elements. It is more
valuable to formulate this obvious fact, that a wide-
spread belief in personal concrete divinities, upon
which an advanced polytheism was based, was an
immemorial phenomenon in this region. Tiele's hypo-
thesis 1 that the earliest Sumerian system was not so
much a polytheism as a polydaimonism, out of which
certain definite gods gradually emerged some time
before the Semitic period, is merely a priori theorising.
The earliest texts and monuments reveal as vigorous a
faith in real divine personalities as the latest : witness 2
that interesting relief recently found on a slab in the
caravan route near Zohab, on which the goddess In-
Hinni is bringing captives to the King Annubanini:
the evidence of the text accompanying it points to a
period earlier than that of King Hammurabi. We may
compare with this the impressive relief which shows
1 Op. cit., p. 170 ; as far as I know, only one fact might be cited in
support of Tide's view, a fact mentioned by Jastrow, op. cit. t p. 52,
that the idiogram of Enlil, the god of Nippur, signifies Lord-Daimon
( Lil=Daimon) ; but we might equally well interpret it " Lord of Winds,"
2 Vide Hiising, Der Zagros und seine Volker, p. 16.
MORPHOLOGY OF COMPARED RELIGIONS 43
us the stately form of Hammurabi receiving his code of
laws from the sun-god Shamash seated on his throne x ;
and of a later date, the alabaster relief from Khorsabad
showing a sacrifice to Marduk, a speaking witness to
the stern solemnity of the Babylonian worship and to
the strength of the faith in personal divinity. 2 That this
faith was as real in the polytheistic Babylonian as in the
monotheistic Israelite is evinced not merely by the
monuments, but still more clearly and impressively by
the Sumerian hymns and liturgies.
Nevertheless the phenomena of animism coexist in
all this region with those of developed theism. By
the side of these high personal deities we find vague
companies of divine powers such as the Igigi and the
Anunnaki, who are conceived more or less as personal
but without clearly imagined individuality, the former
being perhaps definable as the daimones of heaven,
the latter as the daimones of earth. Similarly, in the
Hellenic system we note such nameless companies of
divine agencies as the 'Ep;m and Upctfybtxcu, conceived
independently of the concrete figures of the polytheism.
But, further, in the Mesopotamian religion we must
reckon seriously with lower products of polydaemonism
than these, the demons of evil and disease who so dom-
inated the imagination and much of the religious life
of the private person that the chief object of the
elaborate ritual was, as we shall see, to combat these.
Only, as the curtain gradually rolls away from the
remote past of this earliest home of human culture,
it is not given us to see the gradual emergence of the
divine personalities, or trace as perhaps we may else-
1 Vide Plate in Winckler, " Die Gesetze Hammurabi," in Der Alte
Orient, 1906.
2 Perrot et Chipiez, Histoire de I'art, Assyrie, p. 109, fig. 29 (Roscher,
Lexikon, ii. p. 2358).
44 GREECE AND BABYLON
where the process from polydaimonism to theism.
The gods, as far as we can discern, were always there,
and at least it is not in the second millennium B.C. that
me may hope to find the origins of theistic religion.
As regards the other Semitic stocks, the cumulative
evidence of early inscriptions, literary records, and
legends is sufficient proof that the belief in high personal
divinities was predominant in this millennium. It is
not necessary to labour here at the details of the proof ;
the other lines of inquiry that I am soon going to follow
will give sufficient illustration of this ; and it is enough
to allude to the wide prevalence of the designation of
the high god as Baal or Bel, which can be traced from
Assyria through Syria, in the Aramaean communities,
in Canaan and Phoenicia, and in the Phoenician colonies :
the Moabite Stone tells us of Chernosh ; the earliest
Carthaginian inscriptions of Baal-Hammon and Tanit;
from our earliest witness for Arabian religion, Herodo-
tus, 1 we learn that the Arabs named their two chief
divinities, Orotal and Alilat, a god and a goddess, whom
he identifies with Dionysos and Aphrodite Ourania.
It is still more important for us to know the stage
reached by the Hittite religion in this early period ;
for in the latter half of the second millennium the influence
of the Hittite culture had more chance of touching the
earliest Greek societies than had that of the remote
Mesopotamia or of the inaccessible Canaanites. In the
last thirty years the explorers of Asia Minor, notably
Sir William Ramsay and Dr. Hogarth, have done
inestimable service to the comparative study of the
Mediterranean area by the discovery and interpretation
of the monuments of Hittite art : and the greatest of
them all, the rock-cut reliefs of Boghaz-Keui in Cap-
MORPHOLOGY OF COMPARED RELIGIONS 45
padocia, has given material to Dr. Frazer for construct-
ing an elaborate theory of Hittite sacrifice in his ' Attis,
Adonis, Osiris.' But, before dealing with the Hittite
monuments, the student should note the literary evidence
which is offered by the treaty inscribed on a silver
tablet (circ. 1290 B.C.) found in Egypt, which was
ratified between Ramses u. and the Hittite King Chat-
tusar ; l the witnesses to the treaty are the thousand
gods and goddesses of the Hittite land and the thousand
gods and goddesses of Egypt. We are certainly here not
dealing with mere vague pluralities of spirits, such as
may be found in an animistic system of Shamanism ;
the thousand is only a vague numeral for the plurality
of divinities in the Hittite and Egyptian polytheism ;
the difference of sex would alone suffice to prove that
the Hittite had developed the cult of personal deities,
and the document expressly quotes the great heaven-
god of the Hittites, called by the Egyptian name Sutekh,
and regarded as compeer of the Egyptian Ra. Other
personal Hittite deities are alluded to in the document,
and among them appears to be mentioned a certain
" Antheret of the land of Kheta." 2 Possibly a witness
of still earlier date speaks in the Tel-Amarna letters,
the earliest diplomatic correspondence in the world ; one
of these, written in cuneiform to Amenhotep in., in the
fifteenth century B.C., is from Tushratta, the King of
the Mitani people. 3 Tushratta sends his daughter in
marriage to Pharaoh, and prays that " Shamash and
Ishtar may go before her," and that Amon may " make
her correspond to my brother's wish/' He even dis-
patches a statue of Ishtar of Nineveh, that " she may
1 Messerschmidt, Die Hettiter, p. 9 ,* Stanley Cook, Religion of
Ancient Palestine, p. 73,
2 So Cook, op. cit. t p. 73, who interprets her as Astarte.
3 Winckler, Tel-El- A mama Letters, 17.
46 GREECE AND BABYLON
exercise her beneficent power in the land of Egypt " ;
for she had revealed her desire by an oracle " to Egypt
to the land that I love will I go."
The Mitani chieftains bear names that show a con-
vincingly Aryan formation, and we know from the
momentous inscriptions found in 1907 at Boghaz-Keui
recording treaties between the king of the Hittites and
the king of the Mitani (B.C. 1400), that the dynasts of
the latter people had Aryan gods in their pantheon. 1
But the Mitani themselves were not Aryans, and are
assumed by Winckler and Messerschmidt to be Hittites. 2
If this were proved, the theory which it is the general
aim of these lectures to consider, that the Babylonian
religious system may have reached the Mediterranean
in the second millennium, would receive a certain vrai-
semUance from the fact revealed by the letter of King
Tushratta, namely, that the Mitani of this period had
adopted some of the Mesopotamian personal divinities,
and might therefore have transmitted them to the
coast of Asia Minor. Yet the Hittites had their own
local divine names ; from the cuneiform inscriptions
written in the Hittite language found"&t Van in Armenia,
we gather the names of various Hittite gods, Teshup,
for instance, who appears on a column found at Babylon
holding the lightning, and in his right hand a hammer,
which, from the analogy of other religions, we may
interpret as the fetich-emblem of the thunder. 3
In fact, apart from the literary evidence, the Hittite
1 Vide Winckler, Mittheil des deutsch. Oriewtgesellsch., 1907, No. 35.
2 Winckler, Die Volker Vordemsiens, p. 21 ; Messerschmidt, op. cit.,
p. 5 ; Kennedy, Journ. Royal Asiat. Soc., 1909, p. mo, declares that
their language has been proved to belong to the Ural-Altaic group
and to be akin to Vannic.
8 Vide Messerschmidt, p. 25 (plate) ; Von Oppenheim, Der Tel-
Halaf und die verschleierte Gottin, p. 17, publishes a somewhat similar
figure holding a kind of club.
MORPHOLOGY OF COMPARED RELIGIONS 47
monuments would be proof sufficient of the high develop-
ment of personal religion in these regions. A relief
with Hittite inscriptions, found near Ibriz, the old
Kybistra, near the Cilician gates north of Tauros, shows
us a deity with corn and grapes, and a priest adoring ; l
he is evidently conceived, like Baal by the Semites of
Canaan, as a local god of the earth and of vegetation.
But the most striking of all the Hittite monuments,
and one that is all-sufficient in itself for our present
purpose, is the great series of reliefs on the rock at Bog-
haz-Keui in Cappadocia, not far from the site of the
ancient Pteria. 2 Here is revealed a great and probably
mystic pageant of an advanced polytheism with an
elaborate ritual and a clear faith in high gods and
goddesses : the whole procession seems to be passing
along the narrowing gorge towards a Holy of Holies,
the inner cave-shrine of the Mystery.
As we draw nearer to the Mediterranean, the facts
are too well known to need reiteration here. Every-
where we find proofs of a personal theism reaching far
back into prehistoric times : whether it be the cult of
a high god such as the Cilician divinity, called Zeus or
Herakles by the later Greeks, or the Lycian "Apollo/'
or a great goddess such as Ma of Comana, Cybele of
Phrygia and Lydia. And now to all this testimony
we can add the recently discovered monuments of a
developed Minoan-Mycenaean religion with the elaborate
ritual and worship of personal divinities, anthropo-
morphically imagined on the whole.
Such was the religious world lying before the feet
of the Aryan Hellenes descending from the north ;
1 Perrot et Chipiez, Histoire de I' art, iv. p. 354 (fig.)-
2 Vide Garstang, The Land of the Hittites, pi. Ixiii.-lxxi. ; Messer-
schmidt, op, cit, t pp. 26-27.
48 GREECE AND BABYLON
and when their expansion across the islands to the
Asiatic shores began, they would find everywhere a
religion more or less on the same plane of development.
Therefore if, as some students appear to imagine, the
aboriginal Hellene had not developed personal gods
before he arrived, 1 it would be irrational to conclude
that Babylon had taught him to worship such beings
in place of the vague and flitting daimon. His im-
mediate teachers would be the Minoan-Mycenaean
peoples ; and that their theistic system was derived
from Babylon is a theory lacking both positive evidence
and a priori probability, as I may afterwards indicate.
But that the proto-Hellenic peoples were in that back-
ward condition of religious thought, is in the highest
degree improbable. We must suppose that early
in the second millennium they were slowly pushing
their way down through the Balkans and through the
country that is afterwards Thrace. So far as the earliest
myths and records of this region throw some light on its
prehistoric darkness, it appears to have been dominated
by a great god. When the Thraco-Phrygian race, and
possibly their kinsmen the Bithynoi, penetrated into
the same region, they brought with them a father-god,
who accompanied members of these stocks into Asia
Minor, and settled in Phrygia, Pontus, and Bithynia by
the side of an earlier goddess. Their cousins of the
Indo-Iranian stock had certainly reached the stage of
personal polytheism before 1400 B.C., as the epoch-
making discovery of the Hittite-Mitani inscriptions at
Boghaz-Keui, referred to above, sufficiently indicates. 2
We cannot believe that the Hellenes of the earliest
1 e.g. Outlines of Greek Religion, by R. Karsten, p. 6.
2 Vide supra, p. 46; cf. E. Meyer, Das erste Awftreten der Arier in
der Geschichte in Sitzungsb. d. konigl. Preuss. A bad. Wissensch., 1908,
pp. 14 seq.
MORPHOLOGY OF COMPARED RELIGIONS 49
migration were inferior in culture to those Thracians,
Bithynians, or even Indo-Iranians ; for various reasons
we must believe the reverse. And we now know from
modern anthropology that peoples at a very low grade
of culture, far lower than that which the Aryan stocks
had reached at the time of the great migrations, have
yet attained to the idea of personal and relatively high
gods. In fact, that scepticism of certain philological
theorists who, a few years ago, were maintaining that
the Aryans before their separation may have had no
real gods at all, is beginning to appear audacious and
uncritical. At any rate, in regard to the Hellenes,
the trend of the evidence is to my mind weighty and
clear, making for the conviction that the different
stocks not only possessed the cult of personal gods, but
had already the common worship of certain deities
when first they entered Greece. Otherwise, when we
consider the mutual hostility of the various tribes and
the geographical difficulties in the way of intercourse in
early Greece, it would be difficult to explain the religious
facts of the Homeric poems. We might, indeed, if
Homer was our only witness, suspect him of representing
what was merely local Achaean religion as common to
all Greece. But we can check him by many other
witnesses, by ancient myths and cults of diverse localities.
Zeus was worshipped by some, at least, of the main
tribes, when they were in the neighbourhood of Olympus :
he is no more Thessalian than he is Dryopian. One of
the earliest Hellenic immigrants were perhaps the
Minyai, and their aboriginal god was Possidon. The
ritual of Apollo preserves the clearest reminiscence of
his entry from the north, and he is the high god of one of
the oldest Hellenic tribes, the Dryopes, and the wide
diffusion of his cult suggests that aboriginally it was a
4
50 GREECE AND BABYLON
common inheritance of several stocks. The force of
the evidence that may be urged for this view is ignored
by Wilamowitz in his brilliant but fallacious theory
of the Lycian origin of the god. We must reject
the hypothesis of a proto-Hellenic godless period ;
but, on the other hand, the mere fact that the early
Greek religion appears on the same plane as the Meso-
potamian, in respect of the worship of personal beings,
gives no support at all to the theory of Oriental influence.
If it is to be accepted, it must be sustained by more
special evidence.
CHAPTER IV.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND THERIOMORPHISM IN ASIA
MINOR AND THE MEDITERRANEAN.
A COMPARISON made according to the test we have just
applied is not so important as that which arises in the
second stage of the inquiry. Assuming that the peoples
on the east and west of the Aegean were already on the
same religious plane when the first glimmer of what may
be called history begins, can we discern certain striking
resemblances or differences in their conception and
imagination of divinity, sufficient to prove or disprove
the theory of borrowing or of a movement across large
areas of certain waves of religious influence emanating
from a fixed centre ?
The comparison now becomes more complex, and can
only be summarily attempted. The first leading question
concerns the way in which the personal divine being
is imagined. In Mesopotamia was the religious percep-
tion dominatingly anthropomorphic, not merely in the
sense that the higher divine attributes were suggested
by the higher moral and spiritual life of humanity, but
in the more material sense that the deity was imagined
and represented habitually in human form? This
question has been summarily treated in the first chapter.
The Mesopotamian cults are mainly anthropomorphic ;
in the earliest hymns and liturgies, as well as in the
art-monuments, the divinities appear to have been
51
52 GREECE AND BABYLON
imagined as glorified human forms. The figure of
Shamash on the relief, where he sits enthroned inspiring
Hammurabi, 1 the form of Ninni bringing the captives
to Annabanini, 2 prove a very early dominance of anthro-
pomorphic art in Mesopotamia. And the rule holds
true on the whole of nearly all the great divinities of
the Pantheon ; the statue of Nebo the scribe-god in the
British Museum, 3 and the representation of him on the
cylinders, are wholly anthropomorphic. The seven
planetary deities on the relief from Maltaija are human-
shaped entirely ; 4 we may say the same of the procession
of deities on the relief from a palace of Nineveh published
by Layard, 5 except that Marduk has horns branching
from the top of his head ; just as on the alabaster relief
containing the scene of worship noted above, 6 and on the
wall-relief in the British Museum he is represented with
wings ; but even the rigorous anthropomorphism of
Greece tolerated both these adjuncts to the pure human
type. The types of Ramman the weather-god, 7 and the
representations of a Babylonian goddess, who is occasion-
ally found with a child on her knee, and whom sometimes
we may recognise as Ishtar, show nothing that is
theriomorphic. On the other hand, we must note
exceptions to this general rule. In one of the cuneiform
inscriptions that describe certain types of deities, we read
the following : " Horn of a bull, clusters of hair falling on
his back ; human countenance, and strength of a . . . ;
wings . . . and lion's body." And this description
1 Vide supra, p. 43-
2 Vide supra, p. 43-
a Vid& Roscher, Lexikon, vol. iii. p. 48, s.v. " Nebo."
* Vide Roscher, op. cit., iii. p. 67 (Mitth. aus dem Orient. Sammlung.
zu Berlin, Heft xi. p. 23).
6 Monuments of Nineveh, i. p. 65 (Roscher, op. cit., ii. p. 2350).
P. 43-
7 Roscher, op. cit., vol. iv. p. 29-
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 53
agrees exactly, as Jeremias has pointed out, with the
winged colossal figures, half-lion, half-man, that guarded
the gate of the palace of Nineveh. And we must there-
fore interpret them as gods, not as mere genii ; and he
gives some reason for regarding them as a type of
Nergal, the god of the underworld. 1
Further, we find in an inscription of Asarhaddon
the following prayer : " May the gracious bull-god and
lion-god ever dwell in that palace, protecting the path of
my royalty/' 2
There is some doubt in regard to the winged figures
with eagles' heads on the reliefs from Khorsabad, in the
British Museum (pi. 38-40) : they are represented holding
pine-cones and a " cista mystica " on each side of the
sacred tree, and might be genii engaged in worship ;
but on one of the reliefs Assur-nasir-Pal is standing before
one of them in attitude of adoration.
- ' But the most clear and definite evidence on this point
is afforded by the legend and monuments of the god
whom Berosos calls Cannes, 3 but whom modern Assyri-
ology interprets as the ocean-born god Ea or Ae of
Eridu, the god of all wisdom and science. According
to Berosos, he had entirely a fish body, but a human
head had grown under the head of the fish, human feet
out of the fish's tail, and he spoke with human voice :
a statue of this type was still existing at Babylon accord-
ing to this writer in the time of Alexander. Now the
exact type is presented in the form that appears on
various Babylonian cylinders ; there is one that presents
the fish-man-god standing before the tree of Life re-
ceiving a ray perhaps from the sun above : 4 and half
1 Roscher, op. cit., iii. p. 254-255.
2 Schrader, Keil. BibL, ii. p. 141.
3 Frag. Hist. Graec., ii. p. 496. Frag, i, 3.
4 Nineveh and Babylon, pi, vi. (Roscher, op. cit. t iii. p. 580).
54 GREFXE AND BABYLON
his form from the girdle downwards is preserved on a
bas-relief published by Layard, 1 showing him holding the
bread of life in one hand and in the other a vase contain-
ing the water of life. Here, then, is theriomorphism
straggling with anthropomorphism as we see it strikingly
in the religious monuments of Egypt.
But we have no need of the theory, dear to some
anthropologists that the earliest period of Mesopotamian
religion was purely theriomorphic, when the deities were
imagined and represented merely as animals, and that
the human-shaped deities whom we find standing on
lions in the Babylonian art had once been divine lions
and nothing more, and had at a later period emerged
from the animal into divine manhood. Theriomorphism
and anthropomorphism can and generally do confusedly
co-exist : neither in the lowest savagery or at the highest
culture is there found a purely theriomorphic art or
theriomorphic religion ; on the other hand, severe anthropo-
morphism among the ancient religions is to be found
only in the Hellenic, and we may add in the Judaic,
though here with a quite different mode of expression
and far more sternly controlled. In Mesopotamia we
have nothing that points to a direct worship of animals, 2
but we discern that the anthropomorphism is unstable ;
1 Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, fig, 2. Reseller, op. cit., iii. p. 580.
2 In the Amer. Journ. Archael, 1887, pp. 59-60, Frothingham cites
examples from Assyrian cylinders of birds on pillars or altar with
worshippers approaching : one of these shows us a seated god in
front of the bird (pi. vii. i) ; on another, a warrior approaches a taber-
nacle, within which is a horse's head on an altar, and near it a bird on
a column (pi. vii. 2; cf. the boundary-stone of Nebuchadnezzar L,
published by Miss Harrison, Trans. Congy. Hist. KeL, 1908, vol. ii.
p. 158) ; we find also a winged genius adoring an altar on which is a
cock. But cocks and other birds were sacrificial animals in Babylonian
ritual, and might be interpreted in all these cases as mere temporary
embodiments of the divinity's power ; the human-shaped divinity is
once represented by the side of the bird, and might always have been
imagined as present though unseen.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 55
the religious artist mainly clung to it, except when he
was embodying forms of terror, the destructive demons,
and expecially the powers of the lower world : for this
purpose he selected the most portentous types of
bestiality, such as we find on that bronze tablet, which
used to be regarded as revealing an interesting glimpse
into Babylonian eschatology : at least we may be sure
that the lion-headed female above the horse in the canoe,
at whose breasts two small lions are sucking, is the
goddess of Hell. 1 It was probably through his associa-
tion with the world of death that Nergal acquired some-
thing of the lion's nature, and even the very human
goddess Ishtar might assume a lion's head when she was
unusually wroth, though this rests on a doubtful text.
We may say, then, with fair degree of accuracy, that the
theriomorphic forms of Babylonian religious art belong
to demonology; and in this domain the Babylonian
artist has shown the same powerful imagination as the
Mycenaean : it is the former to whom we are indebted
for the attractively alarming type of the scorpion-man.
The phrase " unstable anthropomorphism " applies
also to the religious literature, to the Sumerian-Baby-
lonian hymns. The imagination of the poets in their
highest exaltation was certainly anthropomorphic on
the whole ; the high divinities are conceived and pre-
sented with the corporeal, moral, and spiritual traits of
glorified humanity. But often in the ecstasy of in-
vocation the religious poets felt the human image too
narrow and straightened for their struggling sense of the
Infinite. Then the expression becomes mystic, and by
virtue of a curious law that I indicated above, it avails
itself of theriomorphic imagery. 2 I quoted the hymn
1 Roscher, Lexikon, iii. p. 268.
* FWchapter i. pp. 14-15.
56 GREECE AND BABYLON
to the warrior Marduk that invokes him as " Black Bull
of the deep, Lion of the Dark House/' Of still more
interest is the invocation of Enlil, the earth-god of Sumer :
" Overpowering ox, exalted overpowering ox, at thy word
which created the world, O lord of lands, lord of the
word of life, Enlil, Father of Sumer, shepherd of the
dark-haired people, thou who hast vision of thyself/' l
Seven times the words "overpowering ox" are added
in this mystic incantation. In another hymn Enlil
is "the Bull that overwhelms"; Ea, "the Ram of
Eridu."
But this is mystic symbolism, rather than a clear
perception of divine personality ; and we may say the
same of such vaguely picturesque phrases as " Bel, the
great mountain," " Asur, the great rock," an expression
parallel to our " Rock of Ages." 2
It naturally happens in a religion of unstable anthro-
pomorphism that the different personalities are unfixed
and may melt away one into the other, or may become
conceived as metaphysical emanations, thus losing
concrete individuality. As Dr. Langdon remarks of
Babylonian religious phraseology, " the god himself
becomes mystified, he retires into the hazy conception of
an all-pervading spirit, and his word becomes the active
agent." 3 Thus even the strongly personal goddess
" Nana " is identified with the word of Enlil ; she herself
exclaims, " Of the Lord his word am L" His statement
accords with the general impression that the liturgies
and monuments of this vast and complex religion make
upon the student. One discerns that the religious
art, and to some extent the religious poetry, developed
1 Langdon, Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, p. 127.
2 Schrader, Keilinsch. Bibl., ii. pp. 79, 83.
8 Op. cit. t p. xix.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 57
and strengthened the anthropomorphic faith and per-
ception of the people, but not so powerfully as to
preclude a mysticising tendency towards metaphysical
speculation that transcended the limits of a poly-
theism of concrete personalities. Even Allat, the
goddess of Hell, she who was presented with the dog's
head and the lions at the breast, was half spiritualised
by the epithet which is rendered "spirit-wind of the
consecrate/* 1
In the other ancient Semitic communities we find
the same phenomenon, a prevailing anthropomorphism
with some slight admixture of theriomorphic idea. At
Bambyke, the later Hierapolis, we have the record and
tradition of Atargatis-Derketo, of human and fish-form
combined. In the cult of Esmun in Phoenicia, Bau-
dissin 2 suspects the incarnation of the god in a snake,
which brought about his later identification with
Asklepios, and he suggests that the bronze serpent
that healed the Israelites in the desert was borrowed
from a Canaanite idol of a healing snake. The
Astarte - images found in prehistoric Palestine are
mainly of human type, but one gives her the curving
horns of a ram, and a rude bronze was found at
Tel Zakariya of an amphibious goddess with human
head and the tail of a fish. 3 Something real underlies
the statement of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebios,
1 Langdon, op. cit. t p. 159, n. 18. Compare with, this the personifica-
tion of abstract ideas ; the children of Shamash are Justice (Kettu) and
Law (Mesaru), and remain impersonal agencies, unlike the Greek 6/us.
A deified Righteousness (sedek) has been inferred from personal
names that occur in the Amarna documents; vide Cook, Palestine,
P- 93-
2 Vide his article on " Eschmun- Asklepios/* in Orient. Stud, zu Th.
Noldeke am joten Geburtstag gewidmet : the proofs are doubtful, but
snake-worship in Phoenicia is attested by Sanchuniathon, Eus. Praep.
Ev., i, 10, 46.
3 Cook, Religion of Ancient Palestine, pp. 30-31.
58 GREECE AND BABYLON
that Astarte placed on her own head the head of a
bull. 1
But these are exceptional phenomena ; and as the
Hellenes in the later period were usually able to identify
the leading Semitic deities with their own, we may see
in this another proof that the Western and Eastern
religions were nearly on the same plane as regards their
perception of divine personality.
Only, we discern signs in Canaan as in Mesopotamia,
that the anthropomorphism is, as I have called it, un-
stable ; for not only can the divinity be imagined as
embodied in other forms than the human, but the
demarcations of individuality tend at certain points to
fall away : the most curious instance of this is that
the female divinity seems at times to have been almost
absorbed in the god. We must, however, distinguish
here between what is real belief and what is mere
theologic phrasing. In a hymn of praise to Ishtar,
composed for the King Ashurbanapal, the equality
of the goddess with the great Assyrian god Ahshur is
quaintly expressed by the phrase, " like Ashur, she wears
a beard " ; but Jastrow 2 protests against the inference
that the goddess was therefore really regarded as male
in the Mesopotamian religion. And indeed this is prob-
ably only a fantastic expression of the idea that Istar
is the compeer in power of the god, and has much of the
masculine temperament. Even in the full vogue of
an anthropomorphic religion which insists on the dis-
tinctions of sex, a mystical religious thinker could rise
to the idea that the divinity might assume the powers
1 Praep. Ev.> i, 10, 31. Glaser, Mittheilungen uber einige Sabaeische
Inschyiften, p. 3-4, gives reasons for affirming the worship of black
bulls in heathen Arabia ; but it is not clear in what relation these stood
to the high personal divinities.
2 Op. cit. t p. 545.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 59
of both natures, an idea of which we find a glimpse in
the later Greek and Greek-Egyptian theosophy. Thus
a Sumerian hymn to Enlil characterises him as " Lord
of winds, father and mother who creates himself"; 1
and a well-known hymn to Sin speaks of him as
" Maternal Body that brings everything to birth,"
and in the next line as " Compassionate, gracious
father." 2
The close approximation of the goddess to the god is
more clearly discernible in the Canaanite religion. On
the Moabite Mesha stone, Ashtar-Chemosh appears as
a double divinity ; and one of the earlier Carthaginian
inscriptions refers to a temple of Moloch-Astarte. 3
Again Astarte, in the inscription on the sarcophagus of
Eshmounazar of Sidon, is called Astart-Shem-Baal,
which signifies Astarte the Face of Baal; and in the
Carthaginian inscriptions the same designation occurs
for Tanit. Renan has interpreted the phrase as expressing
the dogma that the goddess is an emanation of the god,
but Dr. Langdon would explain it as arising from the
close opposition of the two statues face to face, Astart-
Shem-Baal merely meaning, then, " She who fronts
Baal." Whichever interpretation be correct, such close
assimilation of the pair might evolve here and there
the concept of a bisexual divinity. Unless the evidence
of the classical writers is false, it did so at a later period
under Phoenician influences in Cyprus. Macrobius
tells us that there was in that island a statue of a
bearded deity in female dress, regarded as bisexual,
and he quotes Philochoros as witness to the fact, and
to the curious phenomenon in the ritual in which the
1 Langdon, op. cit., p. 223.
2 Zimmern, BabyL Hymn. w. Gebete, p. 1 1 .
3 C. I. Sem., 250.
60 GREECE AND BABYLON
men wore female dress and the women male. This
explains Catullus' phrase " duplex Amathusia" of the
bisexual goddess. Servius and the Christian fathers
repeat the statement, and Joannes Lydus asserts that
the Pamphylians at one time worshipped a bearded
Aphrodite ; a if we trust his authority, we might ex-
plain the fact as due to late Semitic influence, which is
somewhat attested by inscriptions on the coinage of
Pamphylia under the Persian domination. 2 But, at the
most, we can only regard this cult as a late phenomenon,
a local eccentricity, and a morbid development of a
certain vague idea that was working sporadically in the
old Semitic religion. We have no right to assert, as
some have occasionally ventured, that the Semitic
peoples generally accepted the dogma of a bisexual
divinity.
Turning now to the other great area of culture that
lay between Mesopotamia and the coast, that of the
Hittite kingdoms, we find that the Hittite deity is
usually presented in human form. On the great
relief of Boghaz-Keui, the distinctions of the human
family appear in the divine forms, in whom we may
recognise the father god, the mother goddess with her
young son, or it may be, as Dr. Frazer suggests, with her
young lover. And the other Hittite representations
of divinity to which I have referred above are of purely
human form, and so also are the small Hittite bronze
idols in the Ashmolean Museum. Nevertheless here,
as in Mesopotamia, the theriomorphic fancy was active
at the same time. On the relief at Boghaz-Keui, nearest
to the innermost shrine, the Holy of Holies, is an idol
1 For references, videmy Cults of the Greek States, vol. ii., " Aphrodite/'
R. lisa.
2 Vide Head, Hist. Num., p. 586.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 61
of human visage with a body composed of a bizarre
arrangement of lion-forms ; and in the procession near
to the main deities we note a strange representation
of two bulls in mitred caps of Hittite fashion, and to
these mystic beasts we may apply the name theanthropic,
which Robertson Smith suggested for the sacrificial
animal that was half-divine, half-human. And clearer
evidence still is afforded by another relief found
not far from this site at the palace of Euiuk, where a
bull is represented on a pedestal with worshippers
approaching. 1 He is not here the sacrificial animal, for
he and the altar before him are on a higher plane, while
the priest and priestess below are raising their hands
to him as if in adoration, and are leading rams evidently
as victims to the bull-god. We may be sure, then, that
there was some close association of the Hittite divinity
with the bull, as there was with the lions upon which
both god and goddess are standing ; and this is further
illustrated by the horns that adorn the conical cap of
the god at Ibriz, 2 to whom the grapes and corn were
consecrated.
Again, the relief on the gate at Sinjerli 3 affords us
another clear example of a divinity only partly anthro-
, pomorphic : a god with the body of a man and the head
of a lion ; as he bears a hunting weapon in one hand
and a hare in the other, and on each shoulder a bird
is sitting, we may regard him as a deity of the chase.
Finally, from certain cuneiform texts found at Boghaz-
Keui, and recently published and interpreted by Professor
Sayce, 4 we gather that the eagle, probably the double-
1 Perrot et Chipiez, Histoire de Vart, iv. fig. 329 ; cf. Garstang,
op, cit.> p. 256.
2 Supra, p 43.
3 Messerschmidt, op. cit., p. 23.
4 Jown. Roy. Asiat. Soc. t 1909, p. 971.
62 GREECE AND BABYLON
headed eagle which appears as an ensign on Hittite
monuments, was deified; for we appear to have a
reference to "the house" or temple "of the eagle"
(Bit Id Khu), and this fact may help to explain the
figure of a man's body with a bird's head on a relief
of Sinjerli. 1
As regards the test, then, that we are at present
applying, it seems that the Hittite and the Mesopo-
tamian religions were more or less on the same plane,
though we may suspect that theriolatry was stronger
in the former. It is also important for our purpose to
register in passing the clear proof of certain religious
approximations, probably in the second millennium B.C.,
between the Hittites and the Assyrian Babylonian king-
dom. The Hittite god Teshup, with the double-headed
hammer or axe and the forked lightning in his hand, is of
close kin and similar in type to the Canaanite, Syrian,
and Babylonian Ramman-Adad, the god of storms. 2
But the evidence does not yet seem to me to make it
clear which people or group of peoples was in this case
the borrower, which the lender. And the same doubt
arises in respect of the striking art-type of the divinity
standing on the lion; we find it in the early Hittite
monuments, such as the Boghaz-Keui sculptured
slabs ; and again on the relief of Gargamich, on which
is a winged male deity standing on a lion and a
priest behind him, also on a lion; 3 and later among
the Tarsos representations of the Hittite Sandon :
it was in vogue at the Syrian Bambyke and at
Babylon. The assumption of Perrot 4 is that it was
1 Luschan, Ausgrabungen in Sendschirli, Heft iii. Taf. 42, 43 ; cf.
Garstang, op. cit. f p. 274.
2 Vide Roscher, op. cit., iii., s.v. " Ramman."
a Perrot et CMpiez, op. cit,, iv. p. 549, fig. 276 ; cf, fig. 278.
4 Op, tit., ii. pp. 642-644.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 63
of Babylonian origin, but the art-chronology does
not seem to speak decisively in this matter. It is
not necessary here to prejudge this difficult problem :
it does not directly affect our present question, as
the type of the goddess with lions comes into
Hellas only at a later period. As regards the other
Anatolian peoples who came into close contact with
the Hellenes, we may find abiding influences of certain
Hittite religious ideas and motives of religious art. We
may admit that the lion-borne goddess of Boghaz-Keui
is the prototype of Kybele, even the crenelated headdress
that she wears suggesting the turreted diadem of the
later goddess : it is likely that the ancient type of Teshup,
the weather-god with hammer or axe and the lightning,
survived in Commagene in the cult-figure that was
afterwards interpreted as Jupiter Dolichenus : and it
may have influenced the ideas about the thunder-god
in Pontus, as a primitive relief of a god brandishing a
thunderbolt and holding a shield has been found near
Amasia. 1 Speaking generally, we must pronounce the
native pre-Hellenic religious art of the Asia Minor
littoral, of Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, anthropomorphic, so
far as it tried at all to embody the imagined form of
the divinity. The record is generally blurred by the
later Hellenic influences. But we have at least in
Phrygia rude images of the pre-Hellenic Cybele ; the
intention of these is anthropomorphic, and in the rough
outline of the goddess's form as hewn out of the rock of
Sipylos above Smyrna, the Hellenes could discern their
sorrowing Niobe. Where the anthropomorphism fails,
as in the Phrygian monument, which shows Cybele
seated with a phiale and human-shaped in other respects,
but with a head fashioned like " the round capital of a
1 Cumont, Voyage d' exploration dans le Pont, p. 139.
64 GREECE AND BABYLON
pillar," 1 the influence of the aniconic fetich may be the
cause. At any rate, we have no clear trace of therio-
mophism either in the legend nor in the monuments of
the great mother, the Kybele of Phrygia, or the Ma of
Cappadocia. The power of the mountain-goddess was
incarnate in the lions, but we have no ground for saying
that she herself was ever worshipped as a lion.
We turn at last to the Minoan-Mycenaean and proto-
Hellenic periods ; for our present purpose the two
cannot well be kept apart, as much of the evidence con-
cerning the former is derived from records of myths
and religious customs that were in vogue in the later
period. Our first glimpse of the Minoan religion, which
Sir Arthur Evans more than any one else has revealed
to us, 2 gave us the impression of an aniconic worship
that had for its sacred " agalmata " such fetich objects
as the sacred pillar or double-headed axe, but which did
not express its actual imagination of its divinities in any
art-type. If this were so, we should not be able to
answer the question how far the Minaon religion was
purely anthropomorphic until we have found the inter-
pretation of Minoan writing. But our store of monu-
ments has been much enriched by later discoveries in
the Palace of Knossos, and in one of its private chapels
in which the Cross was the central sacred emblem, Sir
Arthur Evans found the interesting figure of the snake-
goddess purely human, but holding snakes in her hands
and girdled with snakes, while before her stands a votary
1 Vide Perrot et Chipiez, op, ctt., vol. iv. fig. 107 ; cf. the relief-
figure of Cybele on a Phrygian rock-tomb, wearing on her head a polos,
with two lions rampant raising their paws to her head, published by
Ramsay, Hell. Jouvn. t 1884, vol. v. p. 245 ; cf, Perrot et Chipiez, iv.
fig. no ("little more than the earlier columnar form of the goddess
slightly hewn," Evans, Hell. Journ., 1901, p. 166).
2 Vide < Mycenaean Stone and Pillar-cult," Hell. Jo^cyn. t igoi.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 65
brandishing a snake : x again, a Minoan signet-ring
published by him 2 revealed the great mountain-goddess
herself on the summit of a peak flanked by lions and
holding a spear. These may be actual reproductions
of cult-images ; and many other gems and other works
have now been published by him and others proving
that the people who belonged to this great Aegean
culture of the second millennium habitually conceived of
their gods in human form, even if they did not as a rule
erect their idols in their temples. Thus on a gern which
shows us an act of worship performed by a female votary
before a sacred pillar, a human-shaped god with rays round
his head and holding a spear is hovering in the air above
it; 3 and on the great sarcophagus of Praisos we have on
the one side a complex scene of ritual, conspicuous for the
absence of any idol or eikon of the divinity, and at the
other end a human form of god, or it may be hero,
standing as if he had just come forth from his shrine
or heroon. 4 In fact, the Minoan-Mycenaean religious
monuments have revealed to us at least three personages,
anthropomorphically conceived, of the popular religion
of the period that we may call pre-Hellenic : a great
goddess, often represented as throned, with fruits and
emblems of vegetation around her, or as standing on a
mountain and associated with lions ; a god who is some-
times conversing with her or is descending from the sky
armed with spear and shield, 5 and sometimes rayed ;
thirdly, the goddess with the snake as her familiar.
1 Evans, " Report of Excavations/' Ann. Brit. School, 1902-1903,
p. 92, fig. 63.
2 Ann. Brit. School, 1900-1901, p. 29, fig. 9.
3 Published by Evans in Hell. Journ., 1901, p. 170, fig. 48.
4 Vide Paribenfs publication in the Monumenti Antichi delta
Accademia dei Lincei, 1908 (xix.), pp. 6-86, pis. i.-iii.
5 Cf. Ann. Brit. School, 1900-1901, p. 59, fig. 38 ; young god with
shield and spear and lioness or mastiff by his side,on clay seal impression.
5
66 GREECE AND BABYLON
To this extent, then, the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples were
on the same plane of religion as those of Mesopotamia :
and the record of the anthropomorphic divinity can be
traced in the Aegean area back to the fourth millennium
B.C. by the nude figures in stone of a goddess of fecundity
with arms pressed across her breasts, a type belonging to
the Neolithic period.
In passing, let us observe that neither the earliest
prehistoric art of the Mediterranean nor the great re-
ligious types of the Minoan divinities recall the art style
of Mesopotamia.
But this developed anthropomorphism of the early
Aegean civilisation is not the whole story. Modern
research has accumulated evidence that seems to point
to a theriomorphic religion in Crete and in Mycenaean
Greece which has been supposed by some to have pre-
ceded the former in order of time and in the logical
process of evolution, and which at any rate survived by
the side of it. Traces of the same phenomenon have
been noted in the Hittite area, and more faintly in
the valley of the Euphrates. The first modern writer
who proclaimed with emphasis the theriomorphic ele-
ments in the prehistoric religions of Greece was Mr. A.
Lang in his Citstom and Myth, connecting it with a
theory of totemism that does not concern us here. After-
wards, a systematic treatment of the problem in the
light of the monuments of the Cretan and Mycenaean
periods was presented by Mr. Cook in a paper published
in the Hellenic Journal of 1894 on "Animal Worship in
the Mycenaean Age " ; and again in 1895 by an essay on
"The Bee in Greek Mythology " : a very full collection
of the materials, with some exposition of important
religious theory, will be found in De Visser's treatise,
De Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem humanam
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 67
(1900). Miss J. Harrison has worked further along
the same lines, and has published some special results
in her paper read before the Congress of the History of
Religions, 1908, and published in its Transactions, on "Bird
and Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian Divinities."
Now the material that forms the fabric of these
researches is so intricate, the relevant facts so manifold
and minute, that it is impossible to consider them in
detail within the limits of this present inquiry, of which
the leading object is an important question of history
concerning the religious influence of the East on the West ;
and, again, the writers above mentioned are deeply con-
cerned with theories about the origins, or at least the
earlier stages in the evolution of religion. And as I am
only comparing East and West in a limited and somewhat
advanced period of their history, I am not necessarily
bound to deal with problems of origin. Nevertheless,
a summary survey of this group of facts may provide us
with important clues towards the solution of our main
question. But a few general criticisms of the assump-
tions which, whether latent or explicit, are commonly
made in the writings just quoted, may be useful at the
outset. First, one finds that the word " worship "
is used very loosely by the ancients as well as by con-
temporary writers : and by its vague and indiscriminate
employment an effort is made to convince us that the
pre-Hellenic and proto-Hellenic world worshipped the
lion, the ox, the horse, the ass, the stag, the wolf, the pig,
the bird, especially the dove, the eagle, and lastly even
the cock. We should have to deal with a savage re-
ligion rioting in theriolatry, and we should not need to
trouble any longer about the theory of its Mesopotamian
origin, for as we have seen theriomorphism played a very
small part in the Sumerian-Babylonian cult. But one
68 GREECE AND BABYLON
must ask more precisely, What is worship; and what
does lion-worship, for instance, imply? Are we to
believe that every one of these animals was worshipped,
the whole species being divine? And does their " wor-
ship " mean that the superstitious people prayed to
them, built altars or sacred columns, or even shrines to
them, and offered them sacrifice? It has become
urgent to reserve some such strict sense for the word as
this, in order to preserve a sense of the distinction be-
tween our ritual-service of a real personal divinity and
the various, often trifling, acts that may be prompted
by the uneasy feeling or reverential awe evoked by the
presence of a curious or dangerous animal. Thus, to
abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is not to
worship mice or weasels : to lament over a dead sea-
urchin is not to worship sea-urchins : to give a wolf a
decorous funeral is not to worship wolves : to throw a
piece of sacrificial meat to flies before a great sacrifice
to some high divinity is not to worship flies. All
these things the civilised Greeks could do, but they
ought not for that to be charged with worshipping
whole species of animals directly as gods. Next let us
bear well in mind that secular animals, like secular
things, can become temporarily sacred through contact
with the altar : thus the ox who voluntarily approached
the altar and ate of the grain or cakes upon it; might be
believed by the Hellenes to become instantly divine, full
of the life of the divinity, and most ceremonious respect
resembling worship might be , meted out to him ; but
we should not hastily believe that the Greeks who
might feel like this towards that particular ox worshipped
all oxen ; or that the society of King Minos worshipped
all axes wherever found, because in peculiar circum-
stances and ritual an axe might become charged with
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 69
divinity. Finally, I may again protest against the fallacy
of supposing that theriomorphism always precedes
anthropomorphism : for an ever-increasing mass of
evidence forces one to the conviction that they are
often co-existent and always compatible one with the
other ; if this is so, it is rash and unscientific to say, as
is so easy to say and is so often said, when one meets in
the Mediterranean or elsewhere a human god or goddess
accompanied by a lion or a cock, that the anthropo-
morphic divinity has been evolved from the animal.
Looking now directly to the Minoan-Mycenaean monu-
ments, before we consider the early Hellenic records, we
must distinguish between those that are obviously cult-
scenes and those that are not obviously but only hypo-
thetically so, and this second class are those with which
Mr. Cook's papers mainly deal. The former have been
treated masterfully by Sir Arthur Evans in his paper on
" Tree and Pillar Cult " ; from these we gather that the
worshipper did not usually pray before an idol, but before
a pillar or a sacred tree combined often with horns of
consecration or an axe ; also that he imagined his deity
generally in human form, the pillar serving as a spiritual
conductor to draw down the divinity from heaven.
Therefore I may remark that the phrase " pillar-cult "
here, and in Miss Harrison's paper quoted above, does
not express the inwardness of the facts. But the latter
writer endeavours to prove the prevalence of a direct
cult of birds in this period ; and further maintains the
dogma that " in the days of pillar and bird anthropo-
morphism was not yet." The Minoan monuments on
which she relies are the great Phaistos sarcophagus,
the trinity of terra-cotta pillars surmounted by doves
found in an early shrine of the Palace of Knossos, 1 with
i Ann. Brit, School, 1901-1902, p. 29.
70 GREECE AND BABYLON
which are to be compared the dove-shrine of Mycenae
and the gold-leafed goddesses of Mycenae with a dove
perched on their heads ; and finally, the semi-aniconic idol
of a dove goddess, with the dove on her head and her
arms outspread like wings, found in another shrine of the
palace of Knossos, and descending from a pre-Mycenaean
traditional type. 1 Whatever we may think of these
monuments, they cannot be quoted as the memorials
of a time " when anthropomorphism was not yet " ;
for the earliest of them, probably that mentioned last,
is of later date than the type of the naked human-
formed goddess of the Neolithic Aegean period.
The question depends wholly on the true interpreta-
tion of the monuments ; as regards the Phaistos sarco-
phagus, the exact significance of the ritual is still a
matter of controversy, to which I may return later,
when I compare the ritual of east and west ; this much
is clear, that a holy service of blood-oblation is being
performed before two sacred trees, into the top of which
two axes are inserted and on the axes are two birds
painted black. Is it immediately clear that " the
birds are objects of a definite cult," as Miss Harrison
maintains ? 2 This may be strongly disputed ; other-
wise we must say that the axe and the tree are equally
direct objects of cult. But the illuminative scene on
the signet-ring described above 3 suggests that the
function of the pillar was to serve as a powerful magnet
to attract a personal divinity. And Sir Arthur Evans
has well shown that the tree and the pillar were of equal
value as sacred objects in Minoan-Mycenaean religion.
A sacrifice doubtless of mystic and magical power is
1 Op. cit., p. 98, fig. 56.
2 Trans. Cong. Hist. Relig., ii. p. 155.
3 P. 65.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 71
being performed before them here : the worshippers
may well believe that the combined influence of blood-
offering, sacred tree, and sacred axe will draw down the
divinity of the skies. In what form visible to the eye
would he descend? The carver of that signet-ring
dared to show him above the pillar in human form, as
the mind's eye though not the sense-organ of the wor-
shipper discerned him. But the artist of the Phaistos
sarcophagus is more reserved. As the Holy Ghost
descended in the form of a dove, so the unseen celestial
divinity of Crete might use any bird of the air as his
messenger, perhaps by preference the woodpecker or
dove. And this natural idea would be supported by
the fact that occasionally birds did alight on the top
of sacred columns, and they would then instantly be
charged with the sanctity of that object and would
be regarded as a sign of the deity's presence and as an
auspicious answer to prayer and sacrifice. Thus many
birds in Greece became sacred by haunting temples;
and Dr. Frazer has suggested that the swallows and
sparrows that nested on the temple or on the altar at
Jerusalem acquired sanctity by the same simple religious
logic. 1 But it is futile to argue that therefore the Hellenes
and Hebrews once worshipped either the whole species
of swallows and sparrows or any single one. And Sir
Arthur Evans' own interpretation of the doves on the
triple group of columns, as being merely " the image
of the divine descent, and of the consequent possession
of the bactylic column by a spiritual being/' is sane and
convincing. 2 This does not prove or necessarily lead
to "bird-worship." Further, he suggests 3 that as the
dove was originally posed on the top of the column
1 Op. cit., i. p. 254.
z Ann. Brit. School, 1900-1901, p. 29, n, 3. 3 Ib., p. 98.
72 GREECE AND BABYLON
as a gracious sign of the divine presence, so when the
human form was beginning to take the place of the
column the dove would then be seen on the human
head, as in the case of the statuettes of goddesses men-
tioned above, and as it appeared on the head of the
golden image at Bambyke, which some called Semiramis. 1
The close association of the Mediterranean goddess and of
the goddess of Askalon; Phoenicia, and Bambyke with
doves may have been caused by several independent
reasons ; one may well have been the habitual frequenting
of her temple by the birds. This would easily grow into a
belief that the goddess when she wished to reveal some-
thing of her presence and power to the external eye
would manifest herself in the bird. This we may call
theriomorphic imagination that goes pari passu easily
with the anthropomorphic. But none of these monu-
ments come near to proving that this Mediterranean
race directly worshipped birds, nor do they suggest any
such theory as that the human divinity emerged from
the bird. We shall, in fact, find that evidence of this
kind that I have been examining, used recklessly in
similar cases, leads to absurd results. 2
Here it is well to remark in passing that the cult of
1 Lucian, De Dea Syy. y 34 ; cf. Diod. Sic. 2, 5, Dove with " Astarte "
on coins of Askalon, autonomous and imperial, Head, Hist. Num.,
p. 679.
2 According to Aelian, certain sparrows were sacred to Asklepios,
and the Athenians put a man to death lor slaying one ( Vav. Hist., v. 17).
Did Asklepios as an anthropomorphic divinity emerge from the
sparrow ? What, then, should we say of the sacred snake who might
better claim to be his parent ? Was Hermes as a god evolved from a
sacred cock ? Miss Harrison believes it (op. cit., ii. p. 161), because
he is represented on a late Greek patera standing before a cock on
a pillar. But the cock came into Europe perhaps one thousand years
after Hermes had won to divine manhood in Arcadia. On the same
evidence we might be forced to say that the goddess Leto came from
the cock (vide Roscher's Lexikon, ii p. 1968, cock on gem in Vienna,
with inscription A^rw
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 73
the Dove-goddess is a test case for trying the question
of Oriental influence on the west. It cannot be traced
back to Babylon, and no one would now maintain the
old theory that the dove-shrines of Mycenae were an
import from the Phoenician Astarte cult. Sir Arthur
Evans' discoveries enable us to carry back this particular
worship in the Aegean to pre-Mycenaean times. We
could with better right maintain that the Syrians bor-
rowed it from the Aegean or possibly from Askalon,
where, as Dr. Evans has pointed out; Minoan influences
were strong. But the most reasonable view is that
which he expresses that " the divine associations of the
dove were a primitive heritage of primitive Greece
and Anatolia/' *
As regards Mr. Cook's theory of Mycenaean animal-
worship, it is not now necessary to examine it at any
length. It was based mainly on a comparison of a
fairly large number of " Mycenaean " seals and gems
from Crete and elsewhere showing monsters bearing
animals on their shoulders or standing by them. He
interpreted the " monsters " as men engaged in a religi-
ous mummery, wearing the skins of lions, asses, horses,
bulls, stags, swine, that is, as ministers of a divine lion,
ass, etc., bringing sacrificial animals to these animal-
deities, and he raised the large questions of totemism and
totemistic cult-practices. His theory presents a picture
of zoolatric ritual that cannot be paralleled elsewhere in
the world either among primitive or advanced societies.
And we begin to distrust it when it asks us to interpret
the figures in a gem-representation as an ass-man bearing
two lions to sacrifice ; for neither in Greece, Egypt; or
1 Ann. Brit. School, 1900-1901, p. 30 ; cf. the paper by M. Salomon
Reinach, " Anthropologie/' vi, " La sculpture en Europe avant les
influences Gr6co-Romaines," p. 561.
74 GREECE AND BABYLON
Asia is there any record of a lion-sacrifice, a ceremony
which would be difficult to carry out with due solemnity.
The more recent discovery of a set of clay-sealings at
Zakro in Crete by Dr. Hogarth; who published them in
the Hellenic Journal of 1902, has rendered Mr. Cook's
view of the cult-value of these " monsters " now un-
tenable. They are found in combinations too widely
fantastic to be of any value for totemistic or a zoolatric
theory, and the opinion of archaeologists like Sir Arthur
Evans and Winter * that these bizarre forms arose from
modifications of foreign types, such as the Egyptian
hippopotamus goddess, crossed at times with the hippo-
kamp and the lion, has received interesting confirmation
from the discovery of a shell relief at Phaistos showing
a series of monsters with hippopotamus heads, and in a
pose derived undoubtedly from a Nilotic type. 2 We
may venture to say that the exuberant fancy of the
Minoan-Mycenaean artist ran riot and amused itself
with wild combinations of monsters; men and animals,
to which no serious meaning was attached.
Only rarely, when the monsters are ritualistically
engaged in watering a sacred palm tree or column, 3
does the religious question arise. And here we may find
a parallelism in Assyrian religious art, in the representa-
tion of " winged genii fertilising the adult palms with
the male cones " ; but according to Sir Arthur Evans
this motive is later in the Eastern art than in the My-
cenaean. Perhaps only one type of monster found on
these gems and seals is derived from a real theriomorphic
figure of the contemporary religion, namely, the Minotaur
1 Evans in Hell. Journ,, 1901, p. 169; Winter, Arch. Anz., 1890,
p. 108.
2 Hogarth, Hell. Jown., 1902, p. 92.
3 Vide gem from Vapheio, published by Evans, Hell. Journ., 1901,
p. 101, fig. i ; cf. p. 117, figs. 13, 14,
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 75
type. A few of the Zakro sealings show the sealed
figure of a human body with bovine head, ears, and
tail 1 ; and a clay seal-impression found at Knossos
presents a bovine human figure with possibly a bovine
head sealed in a hieratic attitude before a warrior in
armour. 2 Such archaeological evidence is precarious,
but when we compare it with the indigenous Cretan
legends of the bull-Zeus and the union of Pasiphae with
the bull, we are tempted to believe that a bull-headed
god or a wholly bovine deity had once a place in Minoan
cult.
To conclude, this brief survey of the Minoan-My-
cenaean monuments points to a contemporary religion
that preferred the aniconic agalma to the human idol,
but imagined the divinity mainly as anthropomorphic,
though this imagination was probably not so fixed as
to discard the theriomorphic type entirely. Therefore
this religion is on the same plane with that of Mesopo-
tamia rather than with that of Egypt.
Turning now to the proto-Hellenic period; which,
without prejudging any ethnic question, I have kept
distinct from the Mycenaean, we have here the advantage
of literary records to assist the archaeological evidence.
I have stated my conviction that the earliest Hellenes
had already reached the stage of personal polytheism
before conquering the southern Peninsula ; and the
combined evidence of the facts of myths and cults
justifies the belief that their imagination of the deity
was mainly anthropomorphic. By the period of the
Homeric poems, composed perhaps some five centuries
after the earliest entrance of the Hellenes, we must
conclude that the anthropomorphism as a religious
1 Hogarth, op. cit., pp. 79, 91.
2 Evans, Palace of Cnossus, p. iB, fig. 7a.
76 GREECE AND BABYLON
principle was predominant in the more progressive
minds that shaped the culture of the race : a minute
but speaking example of this is the change that ensued
in accordance with Homeric taste in the meaning of
the old hieratic epithet fioSvig ; in all probability it
originally designated a cow-faced goddess, but it is
clear that he intends it for ox-eyed, an epithet signifying
the beauty of the large and lustrous human eye. The
bias that is felt in the religious poetry of Homer comes
to determine the course of the later religious art, so
that the religion, art, and literature of historic Greece
may be called the most anthropomorphic or anthro-
pocentric in the world. Yet we have sufficient proof
that in the pre-Homeric age the popular mind was by
no means bound by any such law, and that the religious
imagination was unfixed and wavering in its perception
of divinity : and the belief must have been general
that the god, usually imagined as a man, might manifest
himself at times in the form of some animal. Apollo
Lykeios, the wild god of the woods, was evidently in
the habit of incarnating himself in the wolf, so that
wolves might be sacramentally offered to him or sacrifice
offered to certain wolves. 1 In the Artemis legend of
Brauron and Aulis we detect the same close communion
of the goddess with the bear. Now, upon the fairly
numerous indications in cult-legend and ritual that
the deity was occasionally incarnate in the animal,
much fallacious anthropological theory has been built.
It is not now my cue to pursue this matter au fond. But
it is necessary for my purpose to emphasise the fact
that there is fair evidence for some direct zoolatry in
the .proto-Hellenic period, though there is less than is
often supposed, and it needs always careful criticism.
1 Vide my Cults, iv. p. 115.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 77
As I have already said, the ancients of the later learned
period were often vague and imprecise when they
spoke of " the worship " of animals. Thus Clemens
informs us 1 that the Thessalians " worshipped " ants,
and on the authority of Euphorion that the Samians
" worshipped " a sheep : the word used in each case
being ci|3g;j>. But accurate statements concerning
religious psychology demand the nicest discrimination :
" a little more, and how much it is." We may suspect
that the word <rg|3g/v was as vaguely used in antiquity
as the term " worship " in loose modern writing : and
it is to be remarked that when one authority uses this
word, another may employ the verb rif*v, which does
not imply so much. For instance, Clemens states that
the Thebans " honoured " the weasel ; Aelian, that they
" worshipped " it. 2 We are nearly always left in doubt
how much is meant : whether the animal was merely
treated reverentially and its life spared, or whether
sacrifice and prayers were offered to it : the former
practice may be found in almost any society modern or
ancient, the latter is savage zoolatry, and is a fact of
importance for the religious estimate of a people.
I cannot consider all the cases which are given with
sufficient fullness in the work that I have cited by
De Visser. 3 But the instance cited above the Samian
worship of the sheep [crpojSarov] shows us how little
we have to build our theories on. It is quite possible
that such a story arose from some ritual in which the
sheep was offered reverentially, treated as a theanthropic
1 Protrept., p. 34, P.
2 Protrept., p. 34; P. ; Aelian, Nat. An., xii. 5. Similarly; when
Diodorus tells us that " the Syrians honoured doves as goddesses "
(z, 5), the statement lets little light on the real religious feeling and
religious practice of the people.
3 Op. tit., pp. 129-152.
78 GREECE AND BABYLON
animal, half-human, half-divine, like the bull-calf of
Tenedos in the cult of Dionysos, 1 an interesting form
of sacrifice to which I shall have occasion to refer again.
Clear records of actual sacrifice to animals in Greece
are exceedingly rare. We have the quaint example
of the so-called " Sacrifice " to the flies before the
feast of Apollo on the promontory of Leukas ; this I
have discussed elsewhere, 2 pointing out that it seems
only a ritual trick to persuade the flies to leave the
worshippers alone, and certainly does not suggest the
"worship'* of flies. 2 There is also a dim ritual-legend
attaching to the temple of Apollo the wolf-god in Sikyon;
which appears to point to some sacrifice to wolves in
or near the temple at some early period. 3 The third
case is more important : the " sacrifice to the pig/' which
Athenaeus, quoting from Agathokles of Kyzikos, attests
was an important service at Praisos in Crete, performed
as a vrporeiJjg $v<rtcc, that is, as a preliminary act in
the liturgies of the higher religion. 4 The ritual-legend
'explained the act as prompted by the service that a
sow had rendered to the infant Zeus ; but it remains
mysterious, and we would like to have had more clear
information as to the actual rite. Finally, we have the
most important type of zoolatric ritual in Greece, the
worship of certain sacred snakes : various records attest
this in the cult of Trophonios at Lebadeia and in the
temple of Athena Polias at Athens ; in the cult of Zeus-
Meilichios in the Piraeus, in the sacred grove of Apollo
in . Epeiros, probably in the shrines of Asklepios at
Epidauros and Kos, and elsewhere.
1 See my Cults, v. pp. 165, 167, R. 79.
2 Anthropological Essays -presented to E. B. Tylor, p. 99.
3 Cults, iv. p. 115.
4 This view of the passage is more probable than that which I
have taken in Cults, i. p. 37 (R. 8, p. 141).
ANTHROPOMORPHISM IN ASIA MINOR 79
Now it is important to note that these ritual records
nowhere suggest that whole species of animals were
worshipped, but that only certain individuals of that
species, haunting certain places to which a sense of
religious mystery attached, such as a cave or a lonely
grove, or else found in or near some holy shrine, were
thus marked out as divine. Also, we observe that
in all the examples just quoted, the cult of the animal
is linked to the cult of some personal god or goddess
or hero : the snake, for instance, is the natural incar-
nation of the underworld divinity or hero. The only
exception to this latter rule that may be reasonably
urged is the prehistoric worship of Python at Delphi,
which, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out, is curiously like
the ritual and cult of a fetich-snake in Dahomey. 1 Yet,
for all we know, Python, who in the earliest version of
the story is of female sex, may at a very early time
have been regarded not as a mere snake, but as an
incarnation of the earth-goddess Gaia, who ruled at
Delphi before Apollo came. The question whether the
ancestors of the Hellenes or the pre-Hellenic peoples
with whom they mixed were ever on the lowest plane
of theriolatry does not concern us here. What is
important is, that the records, both Mycenaean and
Hellenic, justify us in believing that the dominant
religion in Greece of the second millennium B.C. was the
worship of personal divinities humanly conceived who
could occasionally incarnate themselves in animal form,
and that where animal worship survived it was always
linked in this way to the cults of personal polytheism.
From the Homeric period onward, the higher Hellenic
spirit shows itself averse to the theriomorphic fashion
of religion ; yet this never disappeared wholly from
1 Commentary on Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 55.
8o GREECE AND BABYLON
the lower circles. Arcadia, the most backward and
conservative of the Greek communities, never accepted
the rigid anthropomorphic canon. This is shown by
the record of the Phigaleian Demeter with the horse's
head; the mysterious goddess Eurynome of Phigaleia,
half-woman, half-fish; the Arcadian Pan, the daimon
of the herds, imagined as with goat legs and sometimes
with goat's head ; and, finally, by the Arcadian idols
of the Roman period found at Lykosoura in 1898,
representing the female form with the head of a cow. 1
This resume of the facts, so far as it has gone, ap-
pears to justify the theorem with which it started, that
the " Mycenaean " peoples and proto-Hellenes in the
second millennium were on the whole, in respect of the
morphology of their religion, on the same plane as
those of the Euphrates valley; only it appears that
theriomorphism played slightly more part in the cults
and legends of the West than in those of the Sumerian-
Babylonian culture. It is obvious to any student of
comparative religion that such general similarity which
we have here observed, and which we might observe if
we compared early Greece with Vedic India, neither
proves nor disproves a theory of borrowing. And so
far there seems no occasion for resorting to such a
theory, unless the type of the fish-goddess at Phigaleia
be considered a reason for supposing Semitic influences
here at work and for tracing her ancestry to Derketo
of Bambyke. For such transference of cult we might
have to invoke the help of Phoenicians, who arrive
on the scene too late to help us in the present quest,
and who are not likely to have been attracted into the
interior of Arcadia.
1 Bull. Corr. Hell, 1899, p. 635 (plate).
CHAPTER V.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS.
THE next clue that I propose to follow in our general
comparison is the relative prominence of the goddess-
cult in the areas that we are surveying. The subject
is of importance and interest, partly because it may
throw some light on the question of the interdependence
of the adjacent religions, partly because it brings into
view certain striking facts of religious psychology, A
religion without a goddess is liable to differ markedly
in tone and colour, and probably in ritual, from those
that possess one. Wherever anthropomorphism is
allowed free play, the same instinct which evolves the
father-god will evolve the mother-goddess ; and when
the religion is one of the type which Tiele calls " Nature-
religions/' one, that is, where ideas reflecting the forces
of the natural world lie on the surface of the conception
of the divine personality, some of these forces are so
naturally regarded as feminine that the evolution of
a goddess appears inevitable ; and the only world-
religions that have rejected this idea are the Judaic,
the Islamic, and Protestant Christianity. Now goddess-
cult is often found to exercise a powerful influence on
the religious emotion ; and the religious psychology of
a people devoted to it will probably differ from those
who eschew it ; often it will be likely to engender a
peculiar sentiment of tenderness, of sentimentality in
6
82 GREECE AND BABYLON
an otherwise austere and repellent religious system ;
and the clinging entreaty of the child is heard in the
prayers or reflected in the ritual ; and just as the
mother frequently stands between the children and the
father as the mild intercessor, so the goddess often
becomes the mediator of mercy to whom the sinners
turn as their intercessor with the offended god. Such
was Isis for the Graeco-Roman world ; such at times was
Athena for the Athenians ; such is the Virgin for
Mediterranean Christendom.
Or the goddess may be more merciless than any
god, more delighting in bloodshed, more savage in
resisting progress : such often was Artemis for the
Greeks, such is Kala at this moment in India, a danger-
ous and living force that threatens our rule. Again,
the goddess may encourage purity in the sexual relations ;
this was the potential value of the ideal of Artemis in
Greece, and perhaps the actual value of Mariolatry in
the Middle Ages. Or the goddess-cult may be the source
of what to us appears gross licentiousness, as was the
case in Babylon and some parts of Asia Minor. This
discordance in the character of goddess-cults may
reflect the diversity of the masculine feeling towards
women, and also to some extent the position of women
at different stages of culture in the family and in the
State. The whole subject has many fascinating aspects,
which relevance prevents me presenting in detail. I
have considered elsewhere the sociologic questions
involved in goddess-cult ; 1 and I must limit my atten-
tion here to its value as ethnic evidence.
In Mesopotamia the phenomenon presents itself at
the very earliest period of which we have record. The
1 Archiv. fur Religionswissenschaft, 1904, " Sociologic hypotheses
concerning the position of women in ancient religion/ 1
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 83
monument already described * on which the goddess
Nini is presenting captives to the King Annabanini;
attests the prevalence of goddess-cult in the third
millennium ; and Tiele supposes without, I think,
sufficient evidence that it was stronger in the Sumerian
than in the Semitic period. At all events, the con-
quering Semites may have found the cult of goddesses
well developed in the land ; and in all probability they
brought at least one of their own with them, namely,
Ishtar, whose name has its phonetic equivalents in
Semitic Anatolia. Also at least by the second millen-
nium B.C., the Babylonian pantheon was organised after
the type of the human family to this extent, that each
male divinity has his female consort ; and it would not
help us now to consider the theorem put out by Jere-
mias and others that the various Babylonian goddesses
are all emanations and varieties of one original All-
mother. Only the mighty Ishtar remains for the most
part aloof from the marriage system; and her power
transcends that of the other goddesses. Originally
the chief goddess of the Sumerian Erech, she was raised
by the Assyrians to the highest position next to their
national god Asshur ; 2 and for them she is the great
divinity of war, who, armed with bow, quiver, and
sword, orders the battle-ranks. In a famous hymn, 3
perhaps the most fervent and moving of all the Baby-
lonian collection, she seems exalted to a supreme place
above all other divinities ; another 4 displays the same
ecstasy in adoration of the goddess Belit, imputing omni-
potence to her, as one to whom the very gods offer
prayers. The same idea may be expressed in a difficult
1 Vide supra, p. 43.
2 Vide Jastrow, op. cit. t i p. 216.
3 Zimmern, Bab. Hymn. u. Gebete, p. 20.
4 16.; p. 24.
84 GREECE AND BABYLON
phrase in a hymn to Nebo 1 which contains his dialogue
with Assurbanipal : " Nebo, who has grasped the feet
of the divine goddess, Queen of Nineveh/' the goddess
who came to be regarded as Ishtar.
From such isolated indications we might conclude
that the Babylonian- Assyrian religion was more devoted
to the goddess than to the god. We should certainly
be wrong, as a more critical and wider survey of the
facts, so far as they are at present accessible, would
convince us. These hymns imputing supreme omni-
potence to the goddess, whether Ishtar or another,
may be merely examples of that tendency very marked
in the Babylonian liturgies, to exalt the particular
divinity to whom worship is at that moment being
paid above all others. The ecstatic poet is always
contradicting himself. To the omnipotent Belit, in
the last-mentioned hymn, a phrase is attached which
Zimmern interprets as " she who carries out the com-
mands of Bel," as if after all she were only a vicegerent.
In the beautiful prayer to Jshtar proffered by the Assyrian
King Asurnasirabal (i8th cent. B.C.) he implores her
to intercede for him; " the Priest- King, thy favourite . . .
with Thy beloved the Father of the gods / ' 2 The beloved
wife naturally plays the Madonna part of the intercessor ;
thus Sanherib prays that Ninlil ' ' the consort of Ashur,
the mother of the great gods, may daily speak a favour-
able word for Sanherib, the king of Assyria, before
Ashur." 3 But the intercessor is not supreme ; and in
spite of the great power of Ishtar and the fervent
1 A. Jeremias in Roscher's Lexikon, vol. iii. p. 62, $.v. " Nebo/'
2 Zeitschr. f. Assyriologie, 1890, p. 72.
3 Jastrow, op. cit. t vol. i. p. 525 ; ct the inscription of the last of
the Babylonian kings, Nabuna 'id, who prays to Ningal, the mother of
the great gods, to plead for him before Sin (Keilinschy. Bibl, iii.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 85
devotion she aroused, the state-pantheon is predomin-
antly masculine.
Nor can we, looking at the ancient records of the
other Semitic peoples, which are often too scanty to
dogmatise about, safely speak of the supremacy of
the goddess in any Semitic community, except in Sidon.
All that we find everywhere, except among the Israelites,
is a goddess by the side of a god. According to Weber,
in his treatise, " Arabien vor dem Islam/' 1 the aboriginal
god of all the Semites when they were in the nomadic
condition was the moon-god ; and the male divinity
is nowhere found to be displaced. He is prominent
among the polytheistic Arabs under the name Athtar. 2
Some of the Arab deities in North Arabia are revealed
to us in an inscription dating probably from the fifth
century B.C., which mentions the gods Salm, Sangala,
Asira, and of these Salm was evidently a war-god, as
he is represented on a relief with a spear. 3
The Aramaic inscriptions only reveal the goddess
Ishtar by the side of many powerful gods such as
Ramman, Adad the god of storms, Shamash the sun-
god, Reshef the god of lightning and war, Baal-charran
the Lord of Harran. 4 An eighth - century Aramaic
inscription found at Sinjerli in North Syria, written in
the reign of Tiglath-Pileser in., mentions no goddess, but
regards the kings as under the protection of Hadad,
Elreshef , and Shamash. 6 Even in Canaan and Phoenicia
we have no reason to say that Astarte rose above Baal ;
such an epithet as " the Face of Baal " appears to
maintain the supremacy of the God. In Moab we have
1 Der Alte Orient (1904), p. 20.
2 Weber, op. cit., p. 19.
3 C. I. Sem., 2, i, n. 2 , 113.
* Sanda, Der Alte Orient, " Die Aramaer," p. 24.
5 Lagrange, Etudes sur les religions semitiques, p. 492.
86 GREECE AND BABYLON
the evidence of the Mesha stone, which mentions the
divine pair Ashtor-Chemosh, and in Numbers 1 the
Moabites are called the people of Chemosh. But we
have Phoenician inscriptions of the period of Persian
supremacy in which the king of Byblos, Jachumelek,
speaks of himself as raised to the kingdom by the Baalat,
the queen-goddess of that state ; and he prays to her
that the queen may give him favour in the eyes of the
gods and in the eyes of the people of his land. 2 Astarte
was par excellence the city-goddess of Sidon, and on
the later Imperial coinage we see her image drawn in
a car. Two representations of her have been found,
in one of which she is seated in front of the king, 3 the
other shows her embracing him. 4 King Tabnit of Sidon,
whose sarcophagus is in the Museum of Constantinople,
styles himself ' ' priest of Astarte, King of the Sidonians." 5
But in the other Phoenician settlements, such as Tyre,
Cyprus, and Carthage, the memorials of the male divinity,
whether Baal, Baal Samin, Baal Ammon, Reshef Mikal,
Esmun-Melqart, are at least as conspicuous. It is likely
that at certain places in the Mediterranean the Semites
were touched by the influences of the aboriginal Aegean
goddess's cult ; this may well have been the case at
Sidon, and still more probably at Askalon, and it may
have penetrated as far as Bambyke.
Speaking generally, however, we may conclude
that among the early Semites the male divinity was
dominant. And if we could believe that this is a reflec-
tion in their theology of the patriarchal system in
society, let us observe that the earliest Babylonian
1 xxi. 29.
2 Von Landau, Die phonizischen Inschriften, p. 13.
3 C. I. Sem., i, ii. ad init.
4 Ib., i, 7, p. 2.
5 Von Landau, op. cit. 9 p. 14.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 87
evidence proves that the patriarchal type of family
was dominant in Babylonia in the third millennium.
Passing over to the non-Semitic group of Anatolian
cults, and considering first the Hittite, we have ample
evidence in the great relief of Boghaz-Keui of the
importance of the goddess ; and it may well be, as Dr.
Frazer has conjectured, that that monument; on which
we see the great god borne on the shoulders of his
worshippers to meet the goddess on the lion, gives us
the scene of a Holy marriage. 1 We find the male and
female divinity united in a common worship on a relief
found near Caesarea in the middle of Cappadocia, on
the left side of which is depicted a warrior-god standing
before a pillar-shaped altar, while a man in the guise
of a warrior is pouring a libation before him ; on the
right is a similar scene, making libation before a seated
goddess, on whose altar a bird is seated. 2 Besides this,
we have another type of goddess shown us on a Hittite
votive-relief, on which is carved a large seated female
figure with a child on her knees ; we may surely in-
terpret this as a flea Kovporpdtyog? Again, on two of the
reliefs at Euzuk we find a seated goddess holding a
goblet and approached with prayers, libations, and other
offerings by priest and priestess, 4 and we may venture
to add to this list of Hittite types the mysterious veiled
goddess found by Von Oppenheim at Tel-Halaf in
Mesopotamia on the Chabur, a branch of Euphrates,
with an inscription containing the name Asshur, a
work which, on the evidence of other cuneiform in-
scriptions found on the site, he would date near to
1 Adonis, Attis, Osiris, 2nd ed., p. 108; Garstang, op. cit.,
pi. Ixv.
2 Messerschmidt, Die Hettiter, pp. 27, 28.
3 Perrot et Chipiez, op. cit., figs. 280, 281.
4 Garstang, op. cit. t pi. Ixxiii. pp. 262-263, 267-268.
88 GREECE AND BABYLON
900 B.C. 1 But this evidence in no way amounts to
any proof or affords any suggestion of the predominance
of the goddess and the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence
of the Hittite kings implies that the male and female
divinity were linked in an equal union in the Hittite
religion. The text of the treaty between Rameses 11.
and the Kheta (circ. 1290 B.C.) includes various sun-gods,
Sutekh, the Egyptian name for the Hittite war-god, and
Antheret (possibly a form of the name Astoret), and
other goddesses called "the Queen of Heaven, the
Mistress of the Soil, the Mistress of Mountains/' 2
Can we draw any conclusions from that extraordinary
monument from Fassirlir 3 on the borders of Lycaonia
and Pisidia, representing a young god in a high cap
that suggests Hittite fashion, standing on the neck
of a stooping goddess at whose side are two lions ?
This might seem a naive indication of male supremacy ;
but the sex of the supporting figure does not seem
clear. 4
Coming now to the Asia-Minor shore, where in the
first millennium B.C. the Hellenic colonisation and culture
flourished, we find the traces of a great goddess-cult
discoverable on every important site ; though recorded
only by later writers, as a rule, and interpreted to us by
the later Greek names, such as Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite,
more rarely Athena, we can still discern clearly that
she belongs to a pre-Hellenic stock. The evidence of
this can be gathered from many sources, and it is un-
1 Der AUe Orient, 1908; Der Tel-Halaf und die verscMeierte Gottin,
PP. 33, 36.
2 Vide Cook, Religion of Ancient Palestine, p. 73 ; Winckler, Tel-el-
Amavna Tablets ; Garstang, op. cit. f p. 348,
3 Published by Ramsay, Cities of St. Paul, p. 134, fig. 7.
4 Garstang, op. cit., pp. 175-176, interprets the figure as a
priest.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 89
necessary to detail it here. What is more important,
and not so easy, is to detect clear proof of the predomin-
ance of the goddess over the god, a phenomenon that
has not yet presented itself clearly in the Semitic
communities, except at Sidon and perhaps Byblos. We
find goddess-cult in Cilicia, where {e Artemis Sarpedonia "
is a name that trails with it Minoan associations ; l
but, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out, 2 at least at Tarsos
and Olba it appears that the male deity was the dominant
power. At the former city a long series of coins attests
the supremacy of Baal-Tars and Sandon-Herakles. At
Olba the ruling priesthood were called the Teuzpfoai,
and claim descent from Teukros and Aias, but Greek
inscriptions giving such names as " Teukros " the
priest, son of Tarkuaris, support the view that Teukros
is a Hellenisation of the divine Hittite name Tarku. It
is in Lycia where we ought, in accordance with a popular
theory, to find the clearest proof of goddess-supremacy ;
for we know that the Lycians had the matrilinear
family system, and this was supposed by Robertson
Smith to lead logically to that religious product. 3 And
recently we have heard Professor Wilamowitz 4 brilli-
antly expound the theory that Leto was the aboriginal
mother-goddess of Lycia, called there in the Lycian
tongue " Lada," and worshipped as supreme with her
son Apollo, both of whom the Hellenes found there,
and while they transformed Lada " the Lady-goddess "
into Leto, surnamed Apollo A^ro/S^, in obedience to
the Lycian rule of calling a son after his mother. And
where a son is worshipped merely as the son of his
1 Vide my Cults, vol. ii, Artemis-References, R. 7Q m .
2 Adonis, etc., 2nd ed., p. 129.
3 Religion of the Semites, p. 52.
4 In lecture delivered in Oxford on "Apollo," and published 1909;
cf. Ms article in Hermes, 1903, p. 575.
90 GREECE AND BABYLON
mother, we may regard the mother-goddess as supreme.
The theory about Apollo's Lycian origin, which, I
think, contradicts all the important facts, does not
concern us here. It is his view that Leto is the aboriginal
and paramount divinity of Lycia which we would wish
to test. So far as it rests on the equation between
Leto and Lada, its philology is bad ; for, as Dr. Cowley
has pointed out on the evidence of Lycian-Greek tran-
scribed names, the Greeks would not have transcribed
Lada as Leto. Furthermore, the geography of the
Leto-cult gives no vraisemblance to the theory of its
Lycian origin ; neither have we any proof at all of
the cult of any goddess in Lycia at an early period,
though no doubt it existed ; the coin of Myra, showing
a goddess emerging from the split trunk of a tree, 1
is of the Imperial period, but preserves an ancient
legend and an archaic idol-type. But the earliest fact
of Lycian religion recorded is the predominance of
Apollo, and the Lycians maintained him as their chief
divinity throughout their history and long after the
very early influences of Hellenic colonisation had
waned. The inscriptions of Lycia that mention Leto
are all of the later period ; her temple near Xanthos and
her two holy groves on the coast that Strabo mentions 2
are just on the track along which the earliest Hellenic
influence travelled : and the most tenable view is that
the Hellenes introduced her. In Caria, at Labranda,
and again in the vicinity of Stratonikeia, we have proof
of the early supremacy of a great god whom the
Hellenes called Zeus, attaching to him in the latter
centre of cult the Carian name of Panamaros, and
associating him with a native goddess called Hera or
1 Cults, vol. ii., " Artemis " Coin-Pi. B, n, 28.
2 Pp. 651, 652, 665.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 91
Hekate, who did not claim to be the predominant
partner. 1
It is not till we come to the neighbourhood of
Ephesos that we can speak positively of goddess-
supremacy. Artemis, as the Greeks called her here,
is admittedly vpetroipovfu, the first in power and in
place. Her brother Apollo himself served as the
ffr$<puvq<f)6pog of the Artemis of Magnesia, that is, as
her officiating magistrate, 2 and Artemis of Magnesia
we may take to be the same aboriginal goddess as the
Ephesian. Certain features of her worship will be
considered later in a comparative survey of ritual and
cult-ideas. I will only indicate here the absence of
any proof of the Semitic origins of the Ephesian Artemis, 3
and the associations that link her with the great mother-
goddess of Phrygia. When we reach the area within
which this latter cult and its cognate forms prevailed,
we can posit the predominance of the goddess as a
salient fact of the popular religion imprinting indelible
traits upon the religious physiognomy of the people.
The god Attis was dear to the aboriginal Phrygian as
to the later generations, but he was only the boy-lover,
the young son who died and rose again. The great
goddess was supreme and eternal ; and her power
spread into Lydia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Galatia,
and far and wide in the later period across the sea.
1 The inscriptions throwing light on the cult at Panamara are
contained in Butt. Corr. Hell., n, 12, 15 (years 1887, 1888, 1891) ;
cf. the article in Roscher's Lexikon, vol. Hi., s.v. " Panamaros."
2 Vide my Cults, vol. iv. p. 173 ; cf. ib., Apollo Geogr. Reg.,
s.v. " Phrygia," p. 452, and R. 57.
3 The type with many breasts might have been suggested by
Babylonian symbolism, for the Goddess of Nineveh is spoken of as
four-breasted (vide Jeremias in Roscher's Lexikon, vol. ii, s.v. "Nebo "),
but Dr. Hogarth's excavations have shown that this form of the
Ephesian idol is late.
92 GREECE AND BABYLON
Her counterpart in Cappadocia was Ma, the great goddess
of Comana, in whose worship we hear nothing of the
male divinity. In this wide area, governed by the
religion of the Great Mother, we can trace a similar
ritual and something of the same religious psychology
in the various peoples : orgiastic liturgy and ecstatic
passion, a craving for complete identification with the
goddess that led to acts of sexual madness such as
emasculation; also a marked tone of sorrow and
tenderness in the legends and religious service. In
following back to its fountain-head the origins of this
cult, we are led inevitably to Minoan Crete.
There are many links revealed both by legend and
cult that associate Crete with the country adjacent
to the Troad, with Lydia and Caria. And we may
tentatively hold to the dogma that Kybele-Rhea, Hipta of
Lydia, who appears now as a virgin, now as a mother-
goddess, Ma who appears in Caria, but whose chief
historic centre was Comana of Cappadocia, were all
descended from or specialised forms of an aboriginal
Aegean or Anatolian goddess whose cult was also main-
tained by the Hittites. Of her nature and ritual I may
speak later. I am only concerned here with the correct-
ness of the view put forward by Sir Arthur Evans. 1
" It is probable that in the Mycenaean religion as in the
later Phrygian, the female aspect of divinity predomin-
ated, fitting on, as it seems to have, down to the matri-
archal system. The male divinity is not so much the
consort as the son or the youthful favourite." If we
put aside the suggestion of a matriarchal theory here,
the main idea in this judgment accords generally
with the evidence that the author of it has himself
done most to accumulate and to present to us. It is
1 Hell. Journ., 1901, p. 168.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 93
not insignificant that the earliest type of Aegean idol
in existence is that of a goddess, not a god ; and in the
more developed Minoan period the representations of
the goddess are more frequent and more imposing than
those of the god ; while in the few scenes of cult where
the male deity appears in her company, he appears
in a subordinate position, either in a corner of the field
or standing before her throne. 1 And a strong current
of early Greek legend induces us to believe that when
the earliest Hellenes reached Crete they found a powerful
goddess-cult overshadowing the island, associated with
the figure of a young or infant god : hence spread the
Cretan worship of Rhea and the Mjyr^p rv 6z5v, and
hence there came to a few places on the Hellenic main-
land, where Minoan influence was strong, the cult and
the cult-legend of the infant Zeus. 2 Yet we must not
strain the evidence too far ; besides the youthful or
infant Cretan god, there may have been the powerful
cult of a father-god as well. On three monuments we
catch a glimpse of the armed deity of the sky. 3 What is
more important is the prominence of the double-headed
axe in the service of the Minoan palace ; and this must
be a fetichistic emblem mystically associated with the
thunder-god, though occasionally the goddess might
borrow it. The prominence and great vogue of this
religious emblem detracts somewhat from the weight
of the evidence as pointing to the supremacy of the
female divine partner. It is Zeus, not Rhea, that inspired
Minos, as Jahwe inspired Moses, and Shamash Hammu-
rabbi. Yet the view is probably right on the whole
that the mother-goddess was a more frequent figure in
1 Vide op. cit., p. 108, fig. 4, and p. 175, fig. 51,
2 Cults, vol. i. pp. 36-38 ; vol. lit pp. 294-296.
3 Cf . those cited in note * above, and the shield-bearing figure
painted on the tomb of Milato in Crete (ib. p. 174).
94 GREECE AND BABYLON
the Minoan service, and was nearer and dearer to the
people.
May we also regard her as the prototype of all the
leading Hellenic goddesses ? The consideration of this
question will bring this particular line of inquiry to a
close.
If we find goddess-supremacy among the early
Hellenes, shall we interpret it as an Aryan-Hellenic
tradition, or as an alien and borrowed trait in their
composite religion ? If borrowed, are they more likely to
have derived it from the East or from their immediate
predecessors in the regions of Aegean culture? The
latter question, if it arises, we ought to be able to
answer at last.
We might guard ourselves at the outset against the
uncritical dogma which has been proclaimed at times
that the goddesses in the various Aryan polytheisms
were all alien, and borrowed from the pre- Aryan peoples
in whose lands they settled. Any careful study of the
Vedic and old-Germanic, Phrygo-Thracian religions can
refute this wild statement : the wide prevalence in
Europe of the worship of " Mother Earth," which
Professor Dieterich's treatise establishes, 1 is sufficient
evidence in itself. Nor could we believe that the early
Aryans were unmoved by an anthropomorphic law of the
religious imagination that is almost universally opera-
tive. The Hellenic Aryans, then, must be supposed to
have brought certain of their own goddesses into Greece,
and perhaps philology will be able one day to tell us who
exactly they were. On linguistic and other grounds,
Dione and Demeter may be accepted as provedly old
Hellenic : on the same grounds, probably, Hera ; also the
name and cult of Hestia is certainly " Aryan/' 2 only we
1 Mutter Erde, 1905. 2 Vide my Cults, v. pp. 345-365-
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 95
dare not call her in the earliest, and scarcely at any
period, a true personal goddess. Now, there is a further
important induction that we may confidently make : at
the period when the Aryan conquerors were pushing their
way into Aegean lands and the Indo-Iramans into the
Punjaub and Mesopotamia, they had a religious bias
making for the supremacy of the Father-God and against
the supremacy of the goddess. We can detect the same
instinct also in the old Germanic pantheon. 1 Its
operation is most visible when the Thrako-Phrygian
stock, and their cousins the Bithynian, broke into
the north of Asia Minor, and the regions on the south
of the Black Sea. The god-cult they bring with them
clashes with the aboriginal and as it proved
invincible supremacy of the goddess linked to her divine
boy: we hear of such strange cult-products as Attis-
TIcwcttoG, Father Attis, and one of the old Aryan titles
of the High God appears in the Phrygian Zeus Bay#/0,
Bagha in old Persian and Bog in Slavonic meaning deity.
The Aryan hero-ancestor of the Phrygian stock, Manes,
whom Sir William Ramsay believes to be identical with
the god Men, becomes the father of Atys ; 2 also we have
later proof of the powerful cult of Zeus the Thunderer,
Zeus the Leader of Hosts, in this region of the southern
shore of the Black Sea. Another induction that I venture,
perhaps incautiously, to make, is that in no Aryan
polytheism is there to be found the worship of an isolatedor
virgin-goddess, keeping apart from relations with the male
1 The Celtic question is more difficult : Prof. Rhys in Ms excellent
paper on Celtic religion, read as a Presidential address at the Congress
of the History of Religions, 1908 (Transactions, ii pp. 201-225), gives
the impression that the goddess was more in evidence than the god in
old Irish mythology, and doubts whether to attribute this to the
non-Indogermanic strain in the population ; he notices also certain
" matriarchal " phenomena in the religion ; cf. ib. t p. 242.
2 Herod., i, 94 ; 4, 45 (note here the Thracian associations of Manes) .
96 GREECE AND BABYLON
deity : the goddesses in India, Germany, Ireland, Gaul, 1
Thrace, and Phrygia are usually associated temporarily
or permanently with the male divinity, and are popularly
regarded as maternal, if not as wedded* Trusting to
the guidance of these two inductions, and always conscious
of the lacunae in our records, we may draw this impor-
tant conclusion concerning the earliest religious history
of Hellas : namely, that where we find the powerful cult
of an isolated goddess, she belongs to the pre-Hellenic
population. The axiom applies at once and most
forcibly to Artemis and Athena ; the one dominant in
certain parts of Arcadia and Attica, the other the
exclusive deity of the Attic Acropolis. Their virginal
character was probably a later idea arising from their
isolation, their aversion to cult-partnership with the
male deity. 2 The Aryan Hellenes were able to plant
their Zeus and Poseidon on the high hill of Athens, but
not to overthrow the supremacy of Athena in the central
shrine and in the aboriginal soul of the Athenian people.
As regards Hera, the question is more difficult : the
excavations at the Heraeum have been supposed by
Dr. Waldstein to prove the worship of a great goddess
on that site, going back in time to the third millennium
B,c., 3 a period anterior to the advent of the god-worship-
ping Aryan Hellenes. And this goddess remained
1 The Romanised-Celtic cult of a vague group of ' ' Sanctae Virgines, ' '
attested by an inscription found near Lyons (Rhys, Hibbert Lectures,
p. 102), counts very little against this induction.
2 The warlike character of these Virgin Goddesses, Athena, Ishtar,
might be explained on a sociologic hypothesis that would also account
for Amazonism ; in modern Albania the girl who refuses marriage is
allowed to wear man's dress and to bear arms, vide Jouvn. Anthrop.
Inst., 1910, p. 460.
3 But in a recent paper (Atjienische Mittheilungen, 1911, p. 27)
Frickenhaus and Muller give reasons for dating the earliest Heraeum
to the eighth century. At any rate, the goddess-cult in this locality
was vastly older.
THE PREDOMINANCE OF THE GODDESS 97
dominant through all history at Argos and Samos.
But we have no reason for supposing that her name was
Hera in that earliest period. Phonetically, the word is
best explained as " Aryan " : if it was originally the
name brought by the Hellenes and designating the wife-
goddess of the sky-god and in spite of recent theories
that contradict it I still incline to this view the Hellenes
could apply it to the great goddess of the Argolid, unless
her aversion to matrimony was a dogma, or her religious
isolation a privilege, too strong to infringe. This does
not seem to have been the case. The goddess of Samian
cult, a twin-institution with the Argive, was no virgin,
but united with the sky-god in an old kpog yafiog. Never-
theless, throughout all history the goddess in Argos, and
probably in Samos, is a more powerful cult-figure than
the god.
As regards Aphrodite, few students of Greek
religion would now assign her to the original Aryan-
Hellenic polytheism. Most still regard her as coming to
the Greek people from the Semitic area of the Astarte
cult. And this was the view that I formerly developed
in the second volume of my cults. But at that time we
were all ignorant of the facts of Minoan-Mycenaean
religion, and some of us were deceived concerning the
antiquity of the Phoenician settlements in Cyprus and
Hellas. The recently discovered evidence points, I
think, inevitably to the theory that Sir Arthur Evans
supports ; that the goddess of Cyprus, the island where
the old Minoan culture lived longest, is one form of the
great goddess of that gifted Aegean people, who had
developed her into various manifestations through
long centuries of undisturbed religious life. Let us
finally observe that it is just these names, Artemis,
Athena* Aphrodite, that have hitherto defied linguistic
7
9 8 GREECE AND BABYLON
explanation on either Aryan or Semitic phonetic principles.
We do not yet know the language of King Minos.
A cursory and dogmatic answer may now be given
to the two questions posed above. The Aryan Hellenes
did not bring with them the supremacy of the goddess,
for the idea was not natural to them : they did not
borrow it from any Semitic people in the second mil-
lennium, for at that time it was not natural to the Semites :
they found it on the soil of the Aegean lands, as a
native growth of an old Mediterranean religion, a strong
plant that may be buried under the deposits of alien
creeds, but is always forcing its head up to the light
again.
Therefore in tracing goddess-cult from the Euphrates
valley to the western Aegean shores, as a test of the
influence of the East on the West, we are brought up
sharply at this point. The Western world is divided
from the Eastern by this very phenomenon that
the older scholars used to regard as proving a
connection. And it may well have been the Western
cult that influenced the western Semites.
CHAPTER VI.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS.
So far as we have gone our main question must be still
regarded as an open one. We may now compare the
particular conceptions concerning divinity that pre-
vailed at the period to which our search is limited, in
the valley of the Euphrates, and in the other communities
that are in our route of comparison. Many striking
points of general similarity will present themselves,
upon which we must not lay too much weight for our
argument, since all polytheisms possess a certain family
likeness : of more importance wiU be certain strikingly
dissimilar features, if we find any.
First, in regard to the general concepts or characters
of the divinities, the same formula seems mainly applic-
able to the Mesopotamian as to the Hellenic facts :
the leading divinities have usually some distinct associ-
ation with the world of nature ; but the natural phen-
omenon or elemental fact that may be there in the
background of their personality, becomes overlaid and
obscured by the complex ethical and mental traits that
are evolved. Therefore the mere nature-fact rarely
explains the fully-developed god, either of Babylon or
of Hellas. A few salient examples will make this clear.
It is only perhaps Shamash the sun-god of Sippar, and
Sin the moon-god of Ur, that retain their nature-signific-
ance rarely obscured. The hymn to Sin in Dr. Langdon's
99
ioo GREECE AND BABYLON
collection reveals an intelligible lunar imagery through-
out ; but in another published by Zimmern, 1 his person-
ality becomes more spiritual and mystical ; he is at once
" the mother-body who bears all life, and the pitiful
gracious father/' the divinity who has created the land
and founded temples ; under the Assyrian regime he seems
to have become a god of war. 2 Shamash even surpasses
him in grandeur and religious value, so far as we can
judge from the documents ; but his whole ethical and
spiritual character, clearly articulated as it is, can be
logically evolved from his solar. But in studying the
characters of Marduk and Nergal, for instance, we
feel that the physical theories of their origin help us
but little, and are at times self-contradictory ; and
it might be well for Assyriologists to take note of
the confusion and darkness that similar theories have
spread in this domain of Hellenic study. Thus we are
told that the Sun in the old Sumerian-Babylonian system
gave birth to various special personalities, representing
various aspects of him : Marduk is the spring-sun,
rejoicing in his strength, although his connection with
Shamash does not seem specially close ; yet Jeremias,
who expresses this opinion, 3 believes also that Marduk
is a storm-god, because " his word can shake the sea/'
ShaU we say, then, that Jahwe is a storm-god " because
the voice of the Lord shaketh the cedar-trees " ? The
phrase is quite innocent if we only mean by it that any
and every personal God could send a storm ; it becomes
of doubtful value if it signifies here that Marduk is an
impersonation of the storm. The texts seem some-
times to contradict each other ; Ninib, for instance,
1 Bab. Hym. u. Gebet^ p. u.
3 Jastrow, op. cit., p. 230.
8 In Reseller's Lexikon, ii. 2371 ; cf. ib. t 2367.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS 101
is regarded by Jeremias l as the rising sun, on the ground
of certain phrases in his hymn of praise ; but the con-
cept of him as a storm-god is more salient in the oldest
texts, and thus he is pre-eminently a deity of destruc-
tion and death, and becomes specially an Assyrian war-
god. Does it help us if we imagine him originally as the
Storm-Sun, as Jensen would have us ? or is it not allow-
able to suspect that solar terms of religious description
became a later Babylonian convention, and that any
deity might attract them ? Nergal, again, the god of
Kutha, has been supposed to have had a solar origin,
as the god of the midday and destructive sun; 2 yet
his special realm is Hades, where he ruled by the side
of the goddess Allatu, and his name is doubtfully inter-
preted as the Lord of the Great Habitation, and thus
he is regarded as a god of disease and death. This
did not hinder him from becoming with Ninib the great
war-god of the Assyrians and their god of the chase,
nor a pious Babylonian poet from exalting him as " God
of the little ones, he of the benevolent visage/' 3
In one of the Tel-El-Amarna texts he is designated
by an ideogram, that almost certainly means "the
god of iron." 4 This last fact, if correct, is an illus-
tration of that which a general survey of the Babylonian
texts at last impresses upon us : the physical origin of
the deity, if he had one, does not often shape and control
his whole career ; the high god grows into manifold
forms, dilates into a varied spiritual personality, pro-
gresses with the life of his people, reflects new aspects
of life, altogether independently of any physical idea
of him that may have originally prevailed. Adad, the
1 Reseller, Lexikon, iii. p. 364.
2 Jeremias, op. cit., iii. p. 250.
3 Langdon, Sum. Baby I. Psalms, p. 83.
4 Roscher, Lexikon, p. 252.
103 GREECE AND BABYLON
god of storms, becomes a god of prophecy, and is ad-
dressed as a god of mercy in the fragment of a hymn. 1
Ea the god of waters becomes par excellence the god of
wisdom, not because waters are wise, but probably
because Eridu, the seat of his cult, was an immemorial
home of ancient wisdom, that is to say, magic. As for
the great Nebo of Borsippa, Jeremias, 2 who is other-
wise devoted to solar theories, has some good remarks
on the absence of any sign of his nature-origin : his
ideogram designates "the prophet," in his earliest char-
acter he is the writer, his symbol is the " stilus " of
the scribe. Yet he does not confine himself to writing :
he is interested in vegetation, and eulogised in one hymn
as "he who openeth the springs and causeth the corn
to sprout, he without whom the dykes and canals would
run dry/' Surely this interest comes to him, not from
the planet Mercury, 3 but from his wisdom and his
concern with Babylonian civilisation, which depended
upon dykes and canals. We are presented here with a
progressive polytheism, that is, one of which the divinities
show the power of self-development parallel with the
self-development of the people.
The question we have just been considering, the
physical character of the Babylonian deities in relation
to their whole personality, suggests two last reflections.
Their gods have a certain relation to the planets, which
is preserved even in our modern astronomy. That
the early Sumerians worshipped stars is probable/ as
the Sumerian sign for divinity is a star; but that the
Sumerian-Babylonian high gods were personal forms
of the planets, is denied by leading modern Assyri-
1 Jastrow, op. cit. 9 p. 484.
2 Rescuer, Lexikon, iii., s.v. "Nebo."
8 As Jeremias supposes, Roscher, op. cit.> iii. p. 60.
4 Vide Tiele, Histoire des anc. relig., p. 242.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS 103
ologists, 1 except in the case of the sun and the moon,
Shamash and Sin. It was only the Chaldaean astron-
omic theory that came to regard the various planets
in their varying positions as special manifestations of
the powers of the different personal gods ; and the
same planet might be a manifestation, according to
its different positions, of different gods : the " star Jupiter
at one point is Marduk, at another point Nebo " ; this
dogma is found on a seventh-century tablet, which
declares at the same time that " Mercury " is Nebo. 2
This planetary association of the deities is well illus-
trated by the memorial relief of Asarhaddon found at
Sinjerli, and the relief of Maltaija, showing stars crowning
their heads ; 3 but both these are later than the period
with which we are here immediately concerned.
Lastly, we fail to observe in that domain of the
old Babylonian religion which may be called nature-
worship, any clear worship of the earth regarded as a
personal and living being, as the Hellenes regarded
Gaia. The great goddesses, Ishtar, the goddess at
once warlike and luxurious, virgin and yet unchaste,
terrible and merciful, the bright virgin of the sky,
Bau, the wife of Ninib, the "amorous lady of heaven,"
are certainly not of this character. Still less is Allalu,
the monstrous and grim Queen of Hell, at whose breast
the lions are suckled. It seems that if the early Sumerians
conceived the earth as a personal divinity at all, they
imagined it as a male divinity. For in the inscriptions
of Nippur, Enlil or Bel appears as a Lord of the under-
1 Vide Winckler, Himmelsund Weltenbild der Babylomer, pp. 10-11.
Jeremias, Roscher, Lexikon, iii. p. 58. But Jastrow, op. ctt., p. 84, seems
to believe in the planetary origin of Ishtar, and would explain her
character as the planet Venus.
2 Winckler, ib.,p. n.
3 Roscher, Lexikon, iii. pp. 66-67.
104 GREECE AND BABYLON
world, meaning our earth as distinct from the heavens :
he is hymned as the "lord of the harvest-lands, lord
of the grain-fields " 1 he is the " husbandman who tends
the fields " ; when Enlil is angry, " he sends hunger
everywhere." In another hymn he is thus described :
" The great Earth-Mountain is Enlil, the mountain-
storm is he, whose shoulders rival the heavens, whose
foundation is the bright abyss " ; 2 and again, " Lord, who
makest to abound pure oil and nourishing milk; . . .
in the earth Lord of life art thou " ; " to give life to the
ground thou dost exist." 3 It is evident that Enlil
is more than the personal earth regarded as a solid
substance ; he is rather the god of all the forces and
life that move on and in the earth, hence he is " the
lord of winds." 4 He is more, then, than the mere
equivalent of Gaia. One might have expected to find a
Sumerian counterpart for this goddess in Ninlil or Belit,
the wife and female double of Enlil or Bel : but in an
inscription that is dated as early as 4000 B.C. she is
styled " The Queen of Heaven and Earth," 5 and though
in a hymn of lamentation addressed to her 6 she is
described as the goddess " who causeth plants to come
forth," yet the ecstatic and mysticising Babylonian
imagination has veiled and clouded her nature-aspect.
This strange religious poetry which had been fer-
menting for thousands of years, was likely enough to
transform past recognition the simple aboriginal fact.
It is only the lesser deities, the " Sondergotter " of
the Sumerian pantheon, whose nature-functions might
remain clear and unchanged : for instance, such a
corn-deity as we see on a cylinder, with corn-ears in
1 Langdon, Hymn xiii. p. 199. 2 /&., p. 221.
3 Id., p. 277. 4 Ibff pt 223
5 Jastrow, op. cit., p. 55. Langdon, op. cit., p, 257.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS 105
his hand and corn-stalks springing from his shoulders. 1
Even the simple form of Tammuz, the darling of the
Sumerian people, has been somewhat blurred by the
poetry of passion that for long ages was woven about
him. As Zimmern has shown in a recent treatise, 2
he was never the chief deity of any Babylonian or
Assyrian state, but nevertheless one of great antiquity
and power with the Sumerian people, and his cult
and story were doubtless spreading westward in the
second millennium. In spite of all accretions and the
obscurity of his name, which is interpreted to mean
" real son of the water-deep/' 3 we can still recognise
the form of the young god of vegetation who dies in
the heat of the summer solstice and descends to the
world below, leaving the earth barren till he returns.
This idea is expressed by some of his names, " the
Lord of the land's fruitfulness, the Lord of the shepherd's
dwelling, the Lord of the cattle-stall, the God of grain/' 4
and by many an allusion to his legend in the hymns,
which are the most beautiful and pathetic in the old
Sumerian psalmody : " in his manhood in the submerged
grain he lay"; "how long still shall the verdure be
imprisoned, how long shall the green things be held
in bondage ? " 5 An interesting title found in some
of the incantation liturgies is that of " the shepherd,"
and like some other vegetation-powers he is at times
regarded as the Healer. Though he was not admitted
1 Pinches, Babylonian and Assyrian Religions, p. 104; cf. "Nidaba, 1 *
Jastrow, op. cit., p. 95, a goddess of agriculture.
2 " Der Babylonische Gott Tamuz," in Abh. Konig. Sachs. Gesell.
Wiss., xxvii. (1909).
3 Zimmern regards Dumuzi or Damuzi as shortened from Dumuzi-
Abzu, but Jastrow (op. cit., p. 90) would keep the two names distinct,
and interprets Dumuzi simply as " Son of Life/ 1
4 Vide Zimmern in Sitzungsb. Konig. Sachs. Gesell. Wiss., 1907.
6 Zimmern, ib. } p. 208 ; cf. Langdon, op. cit., p. 307.
106 GREECE AND BABYLON
as the compeer of the high gods into the Babylonian
or Assyrian pantheon, he may be said to have survived
them all, and his name and myth became the inspiration
of a great popular religion. No other of that vast
fraternity of corn-spirits or vegetation-spirits into
which Dr. Frazer has initiated us, has ever had such a
career as Tammuz. In one of his hymns he is invoked
as " Lord of the world of Death," because for a time
he descended into Hell. 1 If this idea had been allowed
to germinate and to develop its full potentiality,
it might have changed the aspect of Babylonian
eschatology. But, as we shall see, the ideas naturally
attaching to vegetation, to the kindly and fair life of
seeds and plants, were never in Babylonia properly
harmonised with those that dominated belief concerning
the lower world of the dead. The study of the Tammuz-
rites I shall reserve for a later occasion.
We have now to consider the other Anatolian cults
from the point of view of nature-worship. The survey
need not detain us long as our evidence is less copious.
As regards the western Semites, our trustworthy records
are in no way so ancient as those that enlighten us
concerning Mesopotamia. Philo of Byblos, the inter-
preter of the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, presents us
only with a late picture of the Canaanite religion, that
may be marred by their own symbolic interpretations.
Because we are told 2 that " the Phoenicians and
Egyptians were the first to worship the sun and the
moon and the stars," 2 or " the first to deify the growths
of the earth," 3 we cannot conclude that in the second
millennium the religion of the Phoenicians was purely
solar or astral, or merely the cult of vegetation-gods.
1 Zimmern, Siteungsb. Konig, Sachs. Gesell Wiss.i p. 220.
2 Eus., Praep. Ev. t i, 9, 29. 3 Ib,, I, 10, 6.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS 107
" Baalshamin " means the lord of the heavens, an
Aramaic and Phoenician god, and Sanchuniathon
explained him as the sun ; 1 but Robertson Smith gives
good reason for the view that the earliest conception
of the local Baal was of a deity of the fertilising spring,
a local divine owner of a well-watered plot, hence the
giver of all life to fruits and cattle. 2 Nor are we sure
what was the leading " nature-aspect " of the cult of
Astarte. The title " Meleket Ashamaim," " the Queen
of the Heavens/' which Ezekiel attaches to her, does
not inform us precisely concerning her earliest and
original character. From her close association with the
Minoan goddess of Cyprus, she was no doubt wor-
shipped as the source of the life of plants and animals
and men. Also, it is of some value to bear in mind
the later records concerning the worship of Helios at
Tyre in the Roman Imperial period, and of Helios and
the thunder-god at Palmyra, where Adad-Rimmon,
the storm-god who was in power among the western
Semites in the earliest period, may have survived till
the beginning of Christianity. We may conclude from
all this that in the oldest period of the western Semite
societies the cult of special nature-deities was a pro-
minent feature of the religion. But even these may
already in the second millennium have acquired a com-
plex of personal attributes ethical and spiritual. In
the later Carthaginian religion, the personal deities
are clearly distinguished from the mere nature-powers,
such as the sun, earth, and moon ; and this important
distinction may have arisen long before the date of
the document that proves it. 3
1 Eus., Praep. Ev. 9 I, 10, 7. 2 Rel. of Sem., pp. 96-100.
3 Polyb., 7, 9 (the Carthaginian oath of alliance with Philip of
Macedon).
io8 GREECE AND BABYLON
Of the Hittite gods we may say this much at least,
that the monuments enable us to recognise the thunder-
god with the hammer or axe, and in the striking relief
at Ibreez we discern the form of the god of vegetation
and crops, holding corn and grapes. The winged
disk, carved with other doubtful fetich-emblems above
the head of the god who is clasping the priest or king-
on the Boghaz-Keui relief, is a solar emblem, borrowed
probably from Egyptian religious art. And the Hittite
sun-godwas invoked in the Hittite treaty with Rameses n. 1
Whether the mother-goddess was conceived as the
personal form of Gaia is doubtful; her clear affinity
with Kybele would suggest this, and in the Hittite
treaty with Rameses n. mentioned above, the goddess
Tesker is called the Mistress of the Mountains, the express
title of the Phrygian Mother, and another " the Mistress
of the Soil/' 2 Yet evidently the Hittite religion is
too complex to be regarded as mere nature-worship : the
great relief of Boghaz - Keui shows a solemn and
elaborate ritual to which doubtless some spiritual
concepts were attached.
As regards the original ideas underlying the cults
of those other Anatolian peoples who were nearer
in geographical position and perhaps in race to the
Aegean peoples, we have no explicit ancient records
that help us to decide for the second millennium. For
some of these various communities the goddess was, as
we have seen, the supreme power. The great Phrygian
goddess Kybele is the cult-figure of most importance
for our purpose, and it is possible to divine her original
character with fair certainty. 3 In her attributes,
functions, and form, we can discern nothing celestial,
1 Garstang, op. tit.; p. 348. 2 Vide supra, p. 88.
8 Vide my Cults, vol. iii. pp. 295-300.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS 109
solar or lunar ; she was, and remained to the end, a
mother-goddess of the earth, a personal source of and
life of fruits, beasts, and man : her favourite haunt
was the mountains, and her earliest image that we
know, that which the Greeks called Niobe on Mount
Sipylos, seems like a human shape emerging from the
mountain-side : she loved also the mountain caverns,
which were called after her #y/3sAa ; and according to
one legend she emerged from the rock Agdos, and hence
took the name Agdestis. The myth of her beloved
Attis is clear ritual-legend associated with vegetation ;
and Greek poetry and Greek cult definitely linked her
with the Greek Gaia. We gather also from the legend
of Attis and other facts that her power descended to
the underworld, and the spirits of the dead were gathered
to her ; x hence the snake appears as her symbol, carved
as an akroterion above her sepulchral shrine, where she
is sculptured with her two lions at Arslan Kaya " the
Lion Rock in Phrygia " ; 2 and her counterpart, the
Lydian Mother Hipta, is addressed as %00w5y.*
In all her aspect and functions she is the double
of the great Minoan mother-goddess described already,
whose familiar animals are the lion and the serpent,
who claims worship from the mountain-top, and whose
character is wholly that of a great earth goddess with
power doubtless reaching down to the lower world of
the dead. Only from Crete we have evidence which is
lacking in pre-Aryan Phrygia of the presence of a
thunder or sky-god by her side. 4
1 Vide Ramsay, Hell. Journ., v. p. 261 ; my Cults, iii. p. 299.
2 Ramsay, ib., p. 242.
3 Cults, vol. v, p. 296 (Dionysos, R. 63 d).
4 The axe, the thunder-fetish, is attached to her at times, either
because it was the prevalent religious symbol in Crete or because of
her union with the Thunder-God.
no GREECE AND BABYLON
Turning our attention now to the early Hellenic
world, and to that part of its religion which we may
call Nature-worship, we discern certain general traits
that place it on the same plane in some respects with
the Mesopotamian. Certain of the higher deities show
their power in certain elemental spheres, Poseidon mainly
in the water, Demeter in the land, Zeus in the air. But
of none of these is the power wholly limited to that
element : and each has acquired, like the high gods of
Assyria and Babylon and Jahwe of Israel, a complex
anthropomorphic character that cannot be derived,
though the old generation of scholars wearily attempted
to derive it, from the elemental nature-phenomenon.
Again, other leading divinities, such as Apollo, Artemis,
Athena, are already in the pre-Homeric period, as far
as we can discern, pure real personalities like Nebo and
Asshur, having no discoverable nature-significance at
all. Besides these higher cults, we discern a vast
number of popular local cults of winds, springs, rivers,
at first animistically and then anthropomorphically
imagined. So in Mesopotamia we find direct worship of
canals and the river. Finally, we discern 113. early
Hellas a multitude of special " functional " divinities
or heroes, " Sondergotter," like Eunostos, the hero of the
harvest : and it may be possible to find their counter-
parts in the valley of the Euphrates. 1 We have also
the nameless groups of divine potencies in Hellas, such
as the TLpa%ib&cu, Ms/X/%;o/, these being more frequent in
the Hellenic than in the Mesopotamian religion, which
presents such parallels as the Annunaki and the Igigi,
nameless daimones of the lower and upper world : and
1 E.g.{the *' Tile-God/' the lord of foundations and tiles, mentioned
injthe inscription of Nabonid in Keilinschr. Bibl., iii. p. 101 ; but cf.
Jastrow, op. cit., p. 176, who regards him as a special form of Ea.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS in
these in both regions may be regarded as products of
animism not yet developed into theism.
But such general traits of resemblance in two
developed polytheisms deceive no trained inquirer ;
and it would be childish to base a theory of borrowing
on them. What is far more important are the marked
differences in the nature-side of the Greek polytheism,
as compared with the Sumerian-Babylonian. In the
latter, the solar-element was very strong, though per-
haps not so omnipresent as some Assyriologists assure
us. On the contrary, in the proto-Hellenic system it
was strikingly weak, so far as we can interpret the
evidence. The earliest Hellenes certainly regarded the
Sun as a personal animate being, though the word
Helios did not necessarily connote for them an anthro-
pomorphic god. But the insignificance of his figure
in the Homeric poems agrees well with the facts of
actual cult. As I have pointed out in the last volume
of my Cults,' 1 it was only at Rhodes that Helios
was a great personal god, appealing to the faith and
affections of the people, revered as their ancestor and
the author of their civilisation, and descending, we may
believe, from the period of the Minoan culture 2 with
which Rhodes was closely associated in legend. And it
appears from the evidence of legend and Minoan art
that sun-worship was of some power in the pre-Hellenic
Aegean civilisation. In the Mycenaean epoch he may
have had power in Corinth, but his cult faded there in
the historic age before that of Athena and Poseidon.
The developed Hellene preferred the more personal
1 Vol. v. 417-420.
2 For Sim-worship indicated by Minoan monuments vide Evans,
Hell. Journ., 1901, pp. 172-173 ; on a stone at Tenos we find a curious
inscription, 'HXtcxrapTn^ovos (Cults, v. p. 451, R. 37), and Sarpedon is
a Minoan-Rhodian figure.
H2 GREECE AND BABYLON
deity, whose name did not so obviously suggest a
special phenomenon of nature. And if he inherited
or adopted certain solar personages, as some think he
adopted a sun-god Ares from Thrace, he seems to have
transformed them by some mental process so as to
obliterate the traces of the original nature-perception.
Even more significant for our purpose is the com-
parison of the two regions from the point of view of
lunar-cult. We have sufficiently noted already the
prominence of the moon-god Sin in the Babylonian
pantheon, an august figure of a great religion : and
among all the Semitic peoples the moon was a male
personality, as it appears to have been for the Vedic
Indians and other Aryan peoples. The Hellenic im-
agination here presents to us this salient difference,
that the personal moon is feminine, and she seems to
have enjoyed the scantiest cult of all the great powers
of Nature. Not that anywhere in Greece she was wholly
without worship. 1 She is mentioned in a vague record
as one of the divinities to whom vqpdXict, " wineless
offerings," were consecrated in Athens : she had an
ancient place in the aboriginal religion of Arcadia ;
of her worship in other places the records are usually
late and insignificant. The great Minoan goddess may
have attracted to herself some lunar significance, but
this aspect of her was not pronounced.
Here, then, is another point at which the theory of
early Babylonian influence in nascent Hellenic religion
seriously breaks down. And in this comparison of
Nature-cults it breaks down markedly at two others.
The pantheon of Mesopotamia had early taken on an
astral - character. The primitive Hellenes doubtless
had, like other peoples, their star-myths; and their
1 Vide Cults, v. pp. 450-453, for references.
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS 113
superstitions were aroused and superstitious practices
evoked by celestial " teratology/' by striking phen-
omena, such as eclipses, comets, falling stars. 1 But
there is no record suggesting that they paid direct wor-
ship to the stars, or that their deities were astral person-
ations, or were in the early period associated with the
stars : such association, where it arose, is merely a
sign of that wave of Oriental influence that moved west-
ward in the later centuries. The only clear evidences
of star-cult in Hellenic communities that I have been
able to find do not disturb this induction : Lykophron and
a late Byzantine author indicate a cult of Zeus 'Acrepiog
in Crete, which cannot, even if real, be interpreted as
direct star-worship : 2 at Sinope, a city of Assyrian origin,
named after the Babylonian moon-god, a stone with a
late inscription suggests a cult of Seirios and the con-
stellations ; 3 and an Attic inscription of the Roman
Imperial epoch, mentions a priest of the tp&ffpopot,
whom we must interpret as stellar beings. 4 What,
then, must we say about the Dioskouroi, whom we are
generally taught to regard as the personal forms of the
morning- and the evening-star ? Certainly, if the astral
character of the great Twin-Brethren of the Hellenes
were provedly their original one, the general statement
just put forth would have to be seriously modified.
But a careful study of their cult does not justify the
conventional view ; and the theory that Wide has in-
sisted on 5 appears to me the only reasonable account
1 E.g. Plutarch, Vit. Agid., c. n (the Spartan ephors every nine
years watch the sky, and if a star falls take it for a sign of some religious
offence of one of the kings, who is suspended until the Delphic oracle
determines about him) .
2 Cults, vol. i., " Zeus," R. 30.
3 16., vol. v. p. 452, R. 41.
*/&., p. 450, R. 24.
5 Lakonische Kulte, p. 316.
8
n 4 GREECE AND BABYLON
of them, namely, that originally they were heroic
"chthonian" figures, to whom a celestial character
came later to be attached : it is significant that the astral
aspect of them is only presented in comparatively late
documents and monuments, not in Homer or the Homeric
hymn, and that their most ancient ritual includes a
" lectisternium," which properly belonged to heroes and
personages of the lower world.
Lastly, the nature-worship of the Hellenes was pre-
eminently concerned with Mother-earth with Ge-meter,
and this divine power in its varied personal forms was
perhaps of all others the nearest and dearest to the
popular heart : so much of their ritual was concerned
directly with her. And some scholars have supposed,
erroneously, I think, but not unnaturally, that all the
leading Hellenic goddesses arose from this aboriginal
animistic idea. We may at least believe this of Demeter
and Kore, the most winning personalities of the higher
Hellenic religion. And even Athena and Artemis,
whatever, if any, was their original nature-significance,
show in many of their aspects and much of their ritual
a close affinity to the earth-goddess. But, as I have
indicated above, it is impossible to find in the early
Mesopotamian religion a parallel figure to Ge : though
Ishtar was naturally possessed of vegetative functions
so that, when she disappears below the world, all vegeta-
tion languishes yet it would be hazardous to say that
she was a personal form of earth : we may rather suspect
that by the time the Semites brought her to Meso-
potamia from the West, she had lost all direct nature-
significance, and was wholly a personal individual.
Finally, the cleavage between the two groups of peoples
in their attitude towards the powers of nature is still
further marked in the evolution of certain moral and
THE DEITIES AS NATURE-POWERS 115
eschatologic ideas. The concept of a Ge-Themis, of
Earth as the source of righteousness, and of Mother-
earth as the kindly welcomer of the souls of the dead,
appears to have been alien to Mesopotamian imagination,
for which, Allatu, the Queen of the lower world, is a
figure wholly terrible.
CHAPTER VII.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS.
THE next important section of our survey is the compari-
son of the social and ethical aspects of the religions
in the eastern and western areas. Here again the former
warning may be repeated, not to draw rash conclusions
from the observance of mere general points of simi-
larity, such as occur in the religious systems of all the
more advanced societies of which we have any explicit
record.
The idea that religion is merely a concern of the
private individual conscience is one of the latest phen-
omena in all religious history. Both for the primitive
and the more cultured communities of ancient history,
religion was by a law of its nature a social phenomenon,
a force penetrating all the institutions of the political
life, law and morality. But its precise contribution to
the evolution of certain social products in the various
communities is still a question inviting and repaying
much research. It will be interesting to compare
what may be gleaned from Assyriology and the study
of Hellenism bearing on this inquiry, although it may
not help us much towards the solution of our main
question.
We may assume of the Mesopotamian as of other
peoples, that its " social origins " were partly religious ;
only in the valley of the Euphrates, society had already
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 117
so far advanced in the fifth millennium B.C. that the
study of its origins will be always problematic. The
deities are already national, having developed far
beyond the narrow tribal limits before we begin to
discern them clearly ; we have not to deal with the
divinities of clans, phratries, or septs, but of complex
aggregates, such as cities and kingdoms. And the
great cities are already there before our knowledge
begins.
In the Sumerian myth of creation, it is the high god
himself who, after settling the order of heaven and
earth, immediately constructs cities such as Borsippa ;
a passage in Berosus speaks of Oannes, that is to say,
Ea as the founder of cities and temples ; l and the
myths may enshrine the truth that the origin of the
Mesopotamian city was often religious, that the temple
was its nucleus. I cannot discover that this is indicated
by the names of any other of the great cities, Babylon,
Borsippa, Sippar, Kutha ; but it is shown by the name
of Nineveh and its connection with the Sumerian goddess
Nin or Nina, possibly a form of Ishtar. 2 And in the
inscription of Sargon giving the names of the eight
doors of his palace, all named after deities, Ninib
is described as the god "who lays the ground-stone
of the city for eternity " ; 3 also we find designations
of particular cities, as the city of such-and-such a deity. 4
Finally, it may be worth noting in this direction that
Nusku the fire-god, who lights the sacrifices, is called
" the City-Founder, the Restorer of Temples/' 5
The evidence of Anatolia: is late, but it tells the
same story : Sir William Ramsay has emphasised the
* Miiller, Frag. Hist. Gr., ii. 497-
2 Vide Pinches, op. cit., p. 76.
3 Jastrow, op. cit., p. 246.
* Id,, p. 146. 6 W P- 297-
n8 GREECE AND BABYLON
importance for early political history of such names as
Hieroupolis, the City of the Temple, developing into
Hierapolis, the Holy City. 1 In Hellas the evidence
is fuller and older of the religious origin of some, at
least, of the irakus, for some of the old names reveal
the personal name or the appellative of the divinity.
Such are Athenai (the settlements of Athena) ; Potniai,
" the place of the revered ones " ; Alalkomenai, " the
places of Athena Alalkomene ; Nemea, " the sacred
groves of Zeus " ; Megara, probably " the shrines of the
goddess of the lower world " ; Diades, Olympia and others.
The reason of such development is not hard to seek :
the temple would be the meeting-place of many con-
sanguineous tribes, and its sanctuary would safeguard
intertribal markets, and at the same time demand
fortification and attract a settlement. Mecca, the
holy city of Arabia in days long before and after Islam,
had doubtless this origin. 2 We have traces of the same
phenomenon in our English names : Preston, for instance,
showing the growth of a city out of a monastery. In
the later history of Hellenism the religious origin of
the votetg is still more frequently revealed by its
name : the god who leads the colonists to their new
home gives his name to the settlement ; hence the very
numerous " Apolloniai."
But though it is not permissible to dogmatise about
the origin of the great cities in the valley of the Euphrates,
we have ample material supplied by Babylonian- Assyrian
monuments and texts of the close interdependence of
Church and State, to illustrate what I remarked upon
in my inaugural lecture, the political character of the
pantheon. This emerges most clearly when we consider
1 Cities and Bishoprics of Phrygia, p. 68 1.
2 Vide Margoliouth, Life of Mahomet, pp. 7, 8,
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 119
the relations of the monarch to the deity. Of all
Oriental autocracies, it may be said with truth that the
instinctive bias of the people to an autocratic system
is a religious instinct : the kingship is of the divine
type of which Dr. Frazer has collected the amplest
evidence. And this was certainly the type of the
most ancient kingship that we can discover in the
Mesopotamian region. The ancient kings of the Isin
dynasty dared to speak of themselves as " the beloved
consort of Nana." x But more usually the king was
regarded as the son or fosterling of the divinity, though
this dogma need not have been given a literal inter-
pretation, nor did it clash with the well-established proof
of a secular paternity. An interesting example is the
inscription of Samsuilina, the son of Hammurabi, who
was reigning perhaps as early as the latter part of the third
millennium : 2 the king proclaims, " I built the wall in
Nippur in honour of the goddess Nin, the walls of Padda
to Adad my helper, the wall of Lagab to Sin the god,
my begetter/' The tie of the foster-child was as close
as that of actual sonship ; and Assurbanipal is regarded
as the foster-child of the goddess of Nineveh. Nebo
himself says to him in that remarkable conversation
between the god and the king that an inscription has
preserved, 3 "weak wast thou, O Assurbanipal, when
them sattest on the lap of the divine Queen of Nineveh,
and didst drink from her four breasts." Similarly, the
early King Lugalzaggisi declares that he was nourished by
the milk of the goddess Ninharsag, and King Gudea men-
tions Nina as his mother. 4 In an oracle of encouragement
1 Keilinschy. BibL, iii. i, p. 87.
2 King, Hammurabi, pi. 191, no. 97, col. ii. ; Jeremias, inRoscner,
Lexikon, iv. p. 29, s.v. "Ramman."
s Jeremias, s.v. "Nebo," in Roscher, op. cit.> iii. p. 62.
4 Zimmern, K.A.T.*, p. 379-
120 GREECE AND BABYLON
given by the goddess Belit to Assurbanipal, she speaks
to him thus, " Thou whom Belit has borne, do not fear/ 1 1
Now a few isolated texts might be quoted to suggest
that this idea of divine parentage was not confined to
the kings, but that even the private Babylonian might
at times rise to the conception that he was in a sense
the child of God. At least in one incantation, in which
Marduk is commissioned by Ea to heal a sick man,
the man is called "the child of his god" ; 2 and Ishtar
is often designated " the Mother of Gods and men " and
the source of all life on the earth, human, animal, and
vegetative. 3 But the incantation points only to a
vague spiritual belief that might be associated with
a general idea that all life is originally divine. We
may be sure that the feeling of the divine life of the
king was a much more real and living belief than was
any sense that the individual might occasionally cherish
of his own celestial origin. The king and the god were
together the joint source of law and order. The greatest
of the early Babylonian dynasts, Lugalzaggisi, whose
reign is dated near to 4000 B.C., styles himself the
vicegerent (Patesi) of Enlil, the earth-god of Nippur ; 4
and in early Babylonian contracts, oath was taken in
the names both of the god and the king. 5 Hammurabi
converses with Shamash and receives the great code
from his hands, even as Moses received the law from
Jahwe or Minos from Zeus. Did any monument ever
express so profoundly the divine origin of the royal
authority and the State institutions as the famous
1 Schiel in Rev. de I'histoire des religions, 1897, p. 207.
2 Jeremias, Bab. Assyr. Vorstellungen von dem Leben nach dem
Tode, p. 91.
3 Zimmern, K.A.T. 3 , p. 430.
4 Jastrow, op. cit., vol. i. p. 34.
5 Johns, Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, etc., p, 27.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 121
Shamash relief ? l It is the gods who endow Hammurabi
with his various mental qualities : he himself tells us so
in his code, " Marduk sent me to rule men and to proclaim
Righteousness to the world " ; 2 and he speaks similarly
of the sun-god Shamash : " At the command of Shamash,
the great Judge of Heaven and Earth, shall Righteousness
arise up in the land." 3 He proclaims himself, therefore,
the political prophet of the Lord ; and curses with a por-
tentous curse any one who shall venture to abolish his
enactments. The later Assyrian kings have the same
religious confidence : Sargon (B.C. 722-705) proclaims
that he owes his penetrating genius to Ea, " the Lord
of Wisdom/' and his understanding to the " Queen
of the crown of heaven." 4 We find them also, the
Assyrian kings, consulting the sun-god by presenting
to him tablets inscribed with questions as to their
chances of success in a war, or the fitness and loyalty
of a minister whom they proposed to appoint. 5
And this religion affords a unique illustration of
the intimacy of the bond between the king as head of
the State and the divine powers. The gods are the
rulers of destiny : and in the Hall of Assembly at
Esagila each year the Council of the Gods under the
presidency of Nebo fixed the destiny of the king and
the Empire for the ensuing year. 6 This award must
have signified the writing down of oracles concerning
the immediate future, and no doubt the questions were
prepared by the king and the priests. The good king
1 Reproduced on title-page of Winckler, Die Gesetze Hammurabi.
2 Winckler, op. cit., p. 10.
3 Ifc.,p. 39.
4 Keilinschy. BibL, ii p. 47.
5 Vide Knudtzon, Assyrische Gebete an den Sonnengott, p. 241.
6 Vide Langdon, Expositor, 1909, p. 149 ; cf. Jeremias, s.v. "Nebo,"
Roscher, op. cit., iii. p. 55.
122 GREECE AND BABYLON
who was devoted to the service of the gods was glorified
by the priesthood in much the same terms as are applied
in the Old Testament to the king who was devoted to
the service of Jahwe : in the cult-inscription of Sippar
in the British Museum, 1 Nabupaladdin, who reigned
884-860 B.C., and who re-established the cult of Shamash,
is praised by the priest as " the called of Marduk, the
darling of Anu and Ea, the man wholly after the heart
of Zarpanit."
The king, then, is the head of the church, himself a
high-priest, as Gudea was high-priest of Ningirsu, and
as the Assyrian kings described themselves as the priests
of Asshur, the professional priesthood serving as their
expert advisers and ministers. Was he actually wor-
shipped in his life ? This is maintained by some
Assyriologists, and certain evidence points to the
practice. In the conversation between Nebo and
Assurbanipal, to which reference has been made, the
god promises to the king, " I will raise up thy head and
erect thy form in the temple of Bit-Mashmash " ; 2
the names of old Babylonian kings are marked with
the ideogram of divinity, and Professor Jastrow 3
mentions an inscription of the fourth millennium B.C.
in which Gudea ordains sacrifices to his own statues.
A document is quoted by Mr. Johns, 4 recording the
dedication of a piece of land by a private citizen " for
his life," that is to say, to bring a blessing on himself,
to the King Lugalla who is called a god, and to his
consort. But Zimmern 5 considers that the direct
deification of kings was a practice of the earliest period
only, and was never pushed so far as it was in Egypt.
1 Jeremias, Die CuUus-tafel von Sippar.
2 See Jeremias, Roscher, Lexikon^ iii. pp. 62-63. 3 Op. cit., p. 170.
4 Op. cit., p. 223. & K.A.T. 3 , pp. 639-640.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 123
There is reason to suppose that the king or patesi who con-
trolled Nippur had alone the right to be deified, Nippur
being the original centre of the Sumerian religion. 1
The sacred character of the king implied that he
could exercise miraculous functions or put forth divine
" mana " on behalf of his people. We find him in the
earlier period reciting incantations in the dark of the
moon to avert evil from the land. 2 One of the kings of
the dynasty of Ur assumed the title " the exorciser of the
holy tree of Eridu," which may point to certain magic
functions performed by the king on the sacred tree. 3
This political aspect of religion appears pronounced
also in other early communities of the Semitic race ;
the high god or goddess is the head of the State ; the
people of Moab are the sons and daughters of Chemosh ;
the goddess of Askalon and Sidon wears the mural
crown. And doubtless the early Semitic kingship was of
the same sacred character elsewhere as in Mesopotamia.
The King of Moab on the Mesha Stone calls himself the
son of Chemosh ; and Ben-Hadad, King of Damascus,
is the son of Hadad. 4 In the Aramaic inscription
found at Sinjerli, 5 the gods Hadad, El-Reschef, and
Shamash are regarded as special protectors of the
kings. One of the last kings of Sidon, Tabnit, in the in-
scription on his sarcophagus, places his priestly office
before his royal title, " I, Tabnit, priest of Astarte,
King of the Sidonians." 6 King of Byblos or Gobal, in
1 Vide Hilprecht in Babyl. Exped. Univ, Pennsylv,, vol. v. series D,
pp. 24-29.
2 Vide Langdon, Transactions of Congress of History of Religions,
vol. i. p. 251.
3 Keilinschr. BibL, iii. i, p. 97.
4 Vide Frazer's paragraph on. the divine character of Semitic kings
in Adonis, Attis, Osiris 2 , pp. 12-13.
5 Lagrange, &udes sur les religions s/mitiques, p. 492.
* Op. cit., p. 481.
124 GREECE AND BABYLON
the fifth century B.C., regards himself as called to his
high office by the Baalat, the goddess of the State, and
prays that she may bless him and give him length of
days " because he is a just king " : 1 and mention has
already been made of Phoenician monuments showing
the King of Sidon seated with Astarte and embraced by
her. The claim to actual godship may have really been
made by the King of Tyre, as the prophet Ezekiel twice
reproaches him with the blasphemy : " Thou hast said,
I am a God, I sit in the Seat of God, in the midst of the
Seas." *
The Hittite monuments and the text of the Hittite
treaty with Rameses u. reveal a religion of the same
political type. The gods are not only witnesses to the
political contract, but the great Hittite god of heaven
puts his own seal to it ; and the last few lines of the
text contain a careful description of that seal, which
reveals the sacrosanct character of the Hittite kingship ;
for the design chosen was a group of the god and the
Hittite king whom he is embracing. The same signifi-
cance belongs to certain scenes in the great relief of
Bogha2-Keui : on one of the slabs we discern an armed
god with his arm round the neck and his hand grasping
the hand of a smaller figure, whose emblem and dress
suggest a sacerdotal rather than a royal personality.
But the happy coincidence of the description in the
Hittite-Egyptian treaty proves that this is no mere
priest, but a Hittite King 3 of sacred function and semi-
1 C. I. Sem. i, i, i (cf. " Die Phoenizischen Imschriften/'by Freiherr
von Landau, in Der Alte Orient, 1907, p. 13).
z Ezek. xxix. 2, 9 ; quoted by Frazer, supra.
3 The same figure which I interpret as the priest-king occurs in
other religious scenes of Hittite sculpture ; the type might often have
been used for the priest pure and simple, as Dr. Frazer would always
interpret it (vide op. tit., pp. 103-108).
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 125
divine character in affectionate union with his god ;
it suggests also a date not far from the thirteenth
century for the Boghaz-Keui relief; and it makes
unnecessary and improbable the mystic explanation
of this scene that Dr. Frazer has ventured. 1 At this
early period of the Hittite empire, the kingship may not
yet have been detached from the priesthood ; even
later at Comana, in the same country of Cappadocia,
the priests and the kings were drawn from the same
stock. 2 One more detail bearing perhaps on the present
subject may be noted in this monument at Boghaz-Keui :
the goddess wears a crenelated cap, that reminds us
somewhat of the later mural or turreted crown borne
by Cybele and Astarte. May we suppose that this
was the origin of those, and had the same political
significance ?
Again, it may be noted that in Phrygia itself, the
land of the goddess, we have vague evidence in the legend
of Midas that the early kings called by that name were
regarded as the sons of Kybele. 3
As regards the Minoan-Mycenaean religion and its
relation to the State, the excavations on the site of
Knossos suggest that there at least the whole of the
state-cult was in the hands of the kings ; for no public
temples have been found, but only shrines in the palaces.
This is the strongest proof of the sacral power of the
Minoan ruler, and we can well believe that he was
deified after his death; nor need we wholly discredit
that vague statement of Tzetzes that the old kings of
Crete were given the divine name of Zeus [A/W]. 4
* Op. cit., pp. 57-5S-
2 Strab., p. 535-
3 Vide Ramsay, Hell. Journ.i x. p. 158 ; cf. Hyginus, 191 (Midas
Rex Mydonius filius matris Deae).
4 CHI., i, 473 ; vide Cook in Class. Rev., 1903, p. 408.
126 GREECE AND BABYLON
There is value, then, in Homer's picture of Minos as the
friend of God who holds converse with him.
The political significance of Greek religion impresses
itself upon us at a thousand points and under endless
aspects. The deity belongs not to the individual but
to the tribe ; and as in the earliest Hellenic period the
tribes were conscious of a certain community of blood,
their earliest religion appears at many points to have
transcended the tribal limits, and certain deities have
developed a national character. Now evidence vague
and legendary, it is true, but valuable when compared
with the facts of other communities compels us
to conceive of the early Hellenic kings having the
same character as those that we have observed in
Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and Crete ; Homer regards
them as the god-born, who can exercise religious func-
tions, whose decrees have the force of depig. The fire
that burnt on their hearth was sacred and embodied
the life of the community ; and in the later period the
perpetual fire that was maintained in the Prytaneum
of the wokig represented the ancient sacred hearth-fire
of the king. 1 ^Also, when the monarchy was generally
abolished, many of the cities felt compelled to retain
the title of (3curiX$v$ for the priest who carried on the
religious functions as the shadow of the ancient priest-
king. But these similar phenomena are of little ethno-
graphic value. Primitive Hellenism was in these
respects only maintaining its own inherited traditions,
and following the same lines of early social evolution
as those of other communities. On the other hand,
the distinctness of developed Hellenism is the secular
independence of its intellect ; and even in its earliest
1 Vide my Cults, v. pp. 350-354; Frazer, Journ. Philol,< t xiv. " The
Prytaneum, Temple of Vesta."
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 127
mythic period we can believe that the divine character
of the Basileus was less impressively felt, his associa-
tion with the divinity less intimate, than was the
case in Mesopotamia. Neither Agamemnon nor his
predecessors would speak, we may be sure, with the
same astonishing self-consciousness of their divine in-
spiration as the earliest and later kings of Babylon
and Assyria.
Returning to the Mesopotamian societies, we find
much other evidence of the dependence of State-
institutions upon cult and religious ideas. Justice
and the integrity of the Law were virtues consecrated
by old Babylonian religion. One of the most striking
of the Shamash hymns exhibits the sun-god as the
guardian of right judgment" the wicked judge thou
makest to behold bondage him who receives not a
bribe, who has regard to the weak, shall be well-
pleasing to Shamash, he shall prolong his life " :
" Shamash hates those who falsify boundaries and
weights." * The respect for the rights of property to
which the latter phrase alludes, was maintained by
the force of religious sanctions. The King Asurbanipal
declares that he has restored to the Babylonians
their fields that had been wrongfully taken away, " for
fear of Bel and Nebo." 2 A number of inscribed
Babylonian boundary-stones have been found with
symbols of the various high gods carved upon them,
with invocations in their name to deter trespassers,
or those who would remove their neighbour's landmark. 3
One of these is marked with a curse as follows: 4
" May Ninib, the Lord of Boundaries, deprive him of
1 C. D. Gray, The Samas Religious Texts (Brit. Mus.), Hymn i.
2 Keilinschr. Bibl-, ii. p. 131-
3 Cook, Religions of Ancient Palestine, p. 109.
4 Jeremias, Holle f*. Paradies, p. 17.
128 GREECE AND BABYLON
his son the water-pourer " meaning that the man who
violates the boundaries shall leave no son behind
him to perform the funeral rites. Probably other
examples of this practice are to be found in non-Hellenic
Asia Minor ; at present I can only quote one, a late
Phrygian inscription, which, however, may testify to
an early Phrygian religious function, on a slab with
the divine name e Opo(pfau%, " Boundary-guardian/'
inscribed beneath a carved relief-figure of the god Men
bearing a club. 1 In Greece, as is well known, religion
contributed the same aid to the evolution of the law
of private property in land ; the boundary is put under
the protection of Zeus "Qptog, a power similar to the
Latin Jupiter Terminus, or of Hermes c ET/rp^a/o. 2
In this function they are regarded as nether-deities,
whose divinity is latent in the soil. But though Hellas
may have borrowed from Babylon its system of land-
measurement, it did not need to borrow this religious
idea and practice. For these are widespread over the
world : in the Teutonic north the rights of the owner
were sanctified by carrying holy fire from the hearth
round the boundary ; and in savage modern societies
by the use of the terrible weapon of the tabu and by
the erection of fetiches on the boundary mark which
serve as uworpotfcttK. 3 We have here a salient example
of religion as a constructive force in framing a great
social institution, while the motive desire is secular
and purely human.
But we must not, I think, hope to be able to trace
with any exactness the part played by religion in con-
structing the various departments of the social fabric
1 Sterrett, EpigrapMcal Journey, No. 65.
2 Vide CuUs t vol. v. p. 19,
3 Vide Frazer, Psyche's Task, pp. 18-30.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 129
of Babylonia ; for when we get our first glimpse of that
society it is already so far advanced, so complex in
its civilisation, in a sense so modern, that its embryology
is likely to escape us. Nevertheless, it is interesting
for our purpose to study the earliest material, the code
of Hammurabi, to watch what light it throws on the
correlation of religious and secular life.
Some parts of it are missing, but we may be allowed
to pass a temporary judgment on that which is preserved,
and which appears to be the greater part of the whole
corpus. 1 The code, as I have mentioned, is inspired
by the god, safeguarded by the god, and the legislation
is in that sense theocratic ; but as compared, for in-
stance, with the Jewish books of the Law, it impresses
us as the work of a cool-headed lawyer, of secular
utilitarian principles, bringing legal acumen to bear
on the problems of a complex society. At certain
points it is still on the barbaric plane : the principle
of " an eye for an eye " is enacted ; the sense of individual
responsibility for wrong-doing is not yet so far developed
but that vicarious punishment is still allowed ; a man's
son or daughter might be put to death for his own
offence. But in many respects it reveals an advanced
moral and intellectual view, and the religious atmo-
sphere is absent where we should most expect to find
an infusion of it. In the enactments dealing with the
fees due to a physician, we seem to discern that medicine
has become a free and secular science. Still more
important for our purpose are the clauses concerning
homicide, for it is particularly in regard to homicide
that religious feeling has been most operative in the
1 Vide Winckler's "Die Gesetze Hammurabi "in Der Alte Orient,
1906 ; an English version of the code in Johns' Babylonian and Assyrian
Laws and Contracts.
9
I 3 o GREECE AND BABYLON
early legislation of society, and the evolution of our
modern morality concerning this offence has been at
times retarded by religion. Only one clause in the code
happens to deal with deliberate murder, and only murder
in special circumstances, those in which Clytemnestra
murdered Agamemnon : Hammurabi would have im-
paled Clytemnestra : a few other clauses are concerned
with culpable homicide and unintentional. Hammurabi
being himself a master-builder, is severe with bad archi-
tects who build houses so weakly that they fall in and
kill the owners : in such a case he kills the architect.
But he is singularly equitable and mild with a man who
is drawn into a quarrel in which blows are passed, and
who unthinkingly wounds or kills his opponent ; if
he can take an oath that he acted " without knowledge
or without will/' he has only to pay the physician if
the man is wounded, and half a mina of silver if the
man is killed and was of free birth. Here there is no
mention of the blood-feud, and Babylonian society
seems wholly to have escaped from that dangerous
principle of tribal barbarism. 1 Neither is there any
hint of the inherent impurity of all bloodshed, whatever
is the manner of the shedding ; and it seems that
this society was no longer in bondage to that religious
feeling, to which our modern moral sense concerning
murder is in many ways indebted, but which is often
obstructive of legal and ethical progress, and which
coloured so deeply the early Judaic and Hellenic law
of homicide. Further, we note that Hammurabi's
code has come to allow the consideration of motives
1 The son of the slain man could claim compensation for man-
slaughter. In an Assyrian document a slave-girl is handed over to
the son at the grave of the slain man. This is interesting, for it seems
to point to some consideration for the feelings of the ghost (vide Johns,
op. cit., p. 116).
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 131
and extenuating circumstances ; and in this vital
respect it ranks with modern civilised legislation.
Between such a society and the proto-Hellenic com-
munity, at least in regard to the view of homicide, there
was a great gulf fixed.
But for the present let us pursue the code further.
Another crime that early society regards with religious
horror, and of which religion always takes cognisance, is
incest. The enactments of the code deal only with three
cases : incest with daughter, mother, and stepmother ; in
the first, the sinner is driven from the land, probably into
perpetual exile ; in the second, both parties are burned
alive ; in the third, he is merely driven from the paternal
house. The first two punishments reveal, I think,
religious feeling, stronger in the second case than in
the first : the sinner pollutes the land, therefore the
pollution must be purged by his flight, or when most
deadly must be purged away by fire ; for execution by
burning had often the religious significance of a holo-
caust. Still it is only by surmise that we detect
religious colour in the code at this point : in fact, it
emerges clearly only in a few clauses. We note that the
code allows of expurgation by oath-taking ; so did the
early Greeks and our own forefathers, and the practice
is not distinctive of any particular people or group. The
code allows the ordeal in certain cases, as did the Greek,
and as probably every community has done at a certain
stage of religious feeling ; also civilised Babylon counten-
anced trials for witchcraft, and enacted a similar water-
ordeal to that which prevailed in England till fairly
recent times.
One clause is of interest as showing that Hammurabi
was not afraid of any opposition from the priesthood if
he wished to tax Church property ; for he enacts that
132 GREECE AND BABYLON
the ransom of his captured feudal followers (about whom
he is particulurly thoughtful) " shall be paid out of the
property of the temple nearest to the place where they
were taken prisoners/' 2 But the most interesting part of
the code from the religious point of view, are the enact-
ments concerning a class of women who are devoted to the
service of religion, sisters or wives, as they are here called,
of Marduk : but it will be more convenient to consider
these later on when the question of ritual is dealt with.
Apart from this great document, I do not know if
further evidence is forthcoming of the precise influence
of religion on the social system of Babylonia. The two
spheres may once have been closely interdependent ;
but we can see from the earliest legal contracts that law
had already freed itself from religion in the main ; the
judge is a secular authority ; 2 the scribe who draws up
the contracts is a professional notary, and it is not clear
that he had any necessary connection with the temples ; 3
we only hear of certain elders who assisted the judge,
many of whom were temple officials or members of the
guild of Shamash votaries ; 4 also, we find trials taking
place in the temples, especially the temple of Shamash
at Sippara, where the legal judgment was called " the
judgment of Shamash in the house of Shamash/' 6 Much
light has yet to come, no doubt, from Babylon, and new
light perhaps from Anatolia, to illuminate the part
played by religion in the evolution of society. We
would wish to know more concerning the religious side
of family institutions, whether, for instance, there was
any direct cult of the family hearth to which the Hellenes
owed so much. Robertson Smith definitely denies that
1 Vide Johns, op. cit., p. 77. a Op. cit., p. 83.
3 Op. cit.; p. 85.
6 Op. tit,, p. 90.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 133
any of the Semitic races knew of such an institution ;
and he is very probably right, for it belongs more
naturally to the colder climates, where the fixed and
carefully placed hearth is a necessary centre of the
dwelling-room, than to the hotter, where the inhabitants
could be content in winter with a movable brazier. Yet
one text at least may be cited to prove, if rightly inter-
preted, that the hearth could be occasionally deified in a
Babylonian liturgy ; for in a hymn to Nusku the fire-god,
which contains a litany of absolution from sins, we find
the phrase, " May the hearth of the house deliver you and
absolve you," x but the same litany speaks also of the
canals as deified. And we may value these two examples
of that polydaimonism to which we could find parallels
in early Hellas. But this evidence does not point to
any established and regulated hearth-worship which might
serve as the religious bond of family morality. More
than one inscription, however, attests the worship of a
family house-god (ilu-biti), to whom it seems a small
domestic chapel was consecrated. 2 Similarly, we have in
Hellas Zeus c Ep#s70 and Zevs Krfatog. And the Baby-
lonian ilu-biti is mentioned, in association with a
divinity of the street, ila-suki, a name which reminds us
of Apollo 'Ayvtevg. Only, these household and street-
divinities in Babylon may have been mere " daimones "
rather than foot; nor is it clear whether these family
cults were ancestral, the heritage of a particular clan,
or whether they were merely consecrated to the personal
protective deity of the householder, or what part they
played in the family organisation, for instance, in the
1 Translated by Scheil in Rev. de I' hist, des Religions, 1897,
p. 205.
2 Zimmern in K.A.T*, p. 455 ; cf. Ms Beitrdge sur Kenntniss der
Babyl, Religion, ii. p. 147, "for the House-God, the House-Goddess,
for the House-daimon thou shalt erect three altars."
134 GREECE AND BABYLON
marriage-ceremonies, births, and adoptions. So far as I
have been able to study them, the Babylonian litanies
and hymns seem rarely to reflect the religious side of the
family life l ; they are prompted by the needs of the city
and the empire, or by the emotional crises of the indi-
vidual soul. The legal contracts preserved on the brick
tablets throw some light on the forms of the marriage
ceremony, which appears to have been performed usually
in a registration-office rather than a church. There
must surely have been also some religious side to it ;
but the only evidence, so far as I am aware, is a very
curious and doubtful document that has been published
by Dr. Pinches, containing details of a religious ceremony
which appears to be part of a bridal. 3 I will not quote
the quaint and bizarre formulae, as the renderings are
said to be highly conjectural : if they prove correct, one
may judge that the service belongs to a highly advanced
religion; but I cannot adduce any parallel to it from
other peoples. As for the ritual or religious feeling
connected with adoption or birth, I am not aware that
the documents have so far disclosed anything : it is
stated vaguely by Peiser, in his sketch of Babylonian
society, that adoption at Babylon might be prompted
by a religious motive, namely, by the desire of the child-
less parents to have an heir who might continue the
ancestor-worship of the family. But no document is
quoted in proof of this ; and it is very doubtful if we
ought to speak of Babylonian ancestor-worship. 3 We
may suspect that the writer has been misled by the
1 For exceptions, vide infra, pp. 213, 217.
- Vide Johns, op, cit., p. 133 ; quoting from paper by Dr. Pinches in
Proceedings of the Victoria Institute, 1892-93, " Notes on some recent
Discoveries in the Realm of Assyriology."
3 Johns, op. cit., p. 154, etc., treats Babylonian adoption wholly as
a secular business based on secular feelings.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 135
well-known facts of Vedic, Hellenic, and Roman family
cult.
In this, as in other respects, we may feel how advanced,
modern and secular, was Babylonian society. No trace
has appeared as yet of the tribal or phratric system ;
the family is the unit of the State, but individualism is
much developed.
On the other hand, the function of religion as a
constructive force in early Greek society, in the evolution
of tribal and intertribal law, is more obvious and trans-
parent, for in this land we are fortunate enough to
catch glimpses of civilised society in its making, which
are denied to us in Mesopotamia. Hellenic religion
penetrated every domain and department of Hellenic
life to an even greater degree than did Babylonian
religion the society of Babylon. And yet the Greek
mind as it develops becomes pronouncedly secular,
at least in comparison with the Oriental. The con-
tradiction is only apparent. The Hellene used religion
as an instrument for constructing his social order,
for utilitarian ends, as a serviceable minister that
could rarely, and never for long, establish a tyranny.
He even used it to assist and glorify his sports, yet he
varied and arranged these according to his pleasure.
The detrimental tendency of religion to petrify custom
was less marked in his midst than elsewhere ; as usual,
it often lagged behind in the progress of the race, yet it
followed the progress on the whole, and often assisted it.
I cannot here give a detailed account of the social
functions of Greek religion ; and some of its more
interesting phenomena I have tried to analyse in detail
in my Hibleri Lectures and in various chapters of my
Cults : one of the most important of the special questions,
the social or political influence of the cults of ancestors,
136 GREECE AND BABYLON
entered into the course that I delivered last year. I
will only attempt here a brief indication of the salient
facts that will repay special study, confining myself
as far as possible to those that belong to the proto-
Hellenic period. Our knowledge, of course, of the
relation of religion to the social order of life, law, and
morality in the second millennium in Greece, is only dim
and hypothetical : here and there Homer affords us
glimpses ; for the rest, we have legends and cult evidence
which must be carefully and tactfully used. I have
already touched on the religious character of the
ancient kingship, and the evidence of the religious origin
of some of the Hellenic mteig. It is probable that some
of the deities had already in the proto-Hellenic period
a political character, as deities of the assembly or the
" agora/' Thus Apollo 'Ayviwg, at first a divine
leader of the invasion, becomes, when the conquerors
settle on the land, at once a divinity of the city ; and
some scholars would derive his very name from the
aTgAX&, the political assembly. In order to ensure
the settlement and development of law, the debates
and judgments in the market-place must be secured
from armed disturbance such as frequently threatened
the peace of the Icelandic Thing : therefore, in pre-
Homeric days the market-place was consecrated as a
holy place, and the elders who give judgment " hold
in their hands the sceptres of clear- voiced heralds." 1
These words probably refer to the z7]pvzetov> the
badge of Hermes, the god of the market-place, which
as a religious amulet confers inviolability on the bearer.
The same fetich-badge, giving security to the herald
and ambassador, assisted the development of inter-
national law ; and the only spiritual sanction of treaties
1 IL, 18, 505-
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 137
and covenants with other communities was a religious
one, the iorce of the oath sworn and the ordeal-ritual
which accompanied the conclusion of a treaty or contract.
The temple on the borderland of different tribes served
as a secure place for intertribal intercourse, commercial
and festive, and might become the centre of an Am-
phictyony, or federal union of tribes. The constitution
of the Delphic Amphictyony points back to the proto-
Hellenic period. The oracles were beginning in the second
millennium to play a political part, as they did with greater
effect in the first. For Zeus was already at Dodona, and
Apollo, the political god par excellence, at Pytho.
Our indications are slight and dim; but the poet
of the Odyssey seems to be aware that an ofAtpy or
oracular deliverance might be used to dethrone a royal
dynasty. 1 The dedication of a tithe of the captives
taken in war to Apollo was a custom connected with the
earliest settlements and migration, for Apollo disposed
of his captives by colonising them on some vacant land.
The practice appears to have been a very early one,
for this is the legend of the pre-Dorian settlement of
the Dryopes in the Peloponnese ; 2 also there is evidence
for the institution in pre-historic Greece of that religious
system of colonisation which the Latins called" the
Ver Sacrum. 3 In fact, the religion of Apollo, especially
the common worship of Apollo TLudawc, served more
than any other cult as a bond of connection between
the independent communities already I believe in
pre-Homeric days ; and to this earliest epoch may
belong that interesting ritual of the Hyperborean offerings
brought by sacrosanct Hellenic pilgrims down from the
north along the primeval routes of the Aryan immigration. 4
1 Od., 3, 215. 2 Vide Cults, iv. pp. 201-202.
3 Ib., p. 202. * 16., pp. 104-106.
I 3 8 GREECE AND BABYLON
The narrower systems of family and phratry tell
the same story of the constructive power of religion.
The primitive grouping into septs and phratries and
tribal subdivisions, of which the traces are not yet
discovered in the civilisation of Babylon, has left its
deep imprint on historic Greek society; and religion
is intimately interwoven with the domestic and phratric
cults, not only in that these are much concerned with
worship of heroes and ancestors, but that the high
divinities also, Zeus <parp;o, Athena <E>parp/a and
'Awrovpfa, take these institutions under their charge.
Hence all adoptions and admissions of new members
into the phratry had to be performed at the altar.
The marriage ceremony was a religious ritual in Attica,
at least, a religious communion like the Roman Con-
farreatio, 1 and the mutual duties of parents and children,
kinsmen and tribesmen, were consecrated by the early
ideas concerning the divine nature. 2
A festival such as the 'ATrarovptu, instituted to
cement a social organisation, and to all appearances
of great antiquity, has nothing like it in the Babylonian
festival calendar, so far as I am aware ; and again, to
the many political and social titles of the Hellenic
divinities such as Tiohtevg, 'Ayopwog, Ti&vliifbog, Bov-
Xcuos, it would be hard to find parallels in the cult-
terminology of Babylon.
In considering a religion under its social or legal
aspects, the laws concerning homicide will often yield
telling evidence. There is a whole aeon of develop-
ment dividing the code of Hammurabi and the Homeric
and pre-Homeric theory in this matter. The Baby-
lonian had arrived, as we have seen, 3 in some indefinitely
1 Vide my Cults, iii, pp. 80-81. 2 !&., pp. 53~55-
3 Vide supra, pp. 129-131.
THE DEITIES AS SOCIAL-POWERS 139
early period at the conception of murder as a crime
against the whole State, at what we may call the ad-
vanced secular point of view. In Greece that conception
is post-Homeric : the Homeric and pre-Homeric societies
were still in the stage of law in which homicide is treated
as a private affair of the kinsmen, a matter to be settled
by the blood-feud or weregild. Only in certain cases
it was a sin, namely, when the slain person was a sup-
pliant or a kinsman. The religious feeling in respect of the
first partly arises from the old Aryan Hearth-worship ; *
in respect of the second, it is associated with a primitive
tribal horror of shedding kindred blood : and, though
the feeling of the religious sanctity of ihe guest, the
suppliant, and the kinsman was strong in Semitic com-
munities, I cannot find any special Babylonian cult
that is analogous to that of Zeus Me/X/%fO, or e l%t<rto$,
or Esv/0. I have traced elsewhere the development
in the ninth and eighth centuries of the more civilised
legislation concerning homicide in Greece, and I have
tried to indicate the precise part played by religion in
aiding the evolution : 2 to get to the facts one must
specially study the worship of Athena and Apollo.
I have connected it with a growing sense of the impurity
of bloodshed, which might express itself in a definite
religious way, as fear of the ghost or of the offended
deity. It is open to us to explain this increased sen-
sitiveness concerning purity as a mark of Oriental
influence, which was reaching Greece in the first millen-
nium B.C. But at least we ought not to derive it from
Mesopotamia until we find evidence of purifications
from bloodshed as a common ritual in Babylonian
religion, and the impurity of bloodshed an underlying
1 Vide my Cults, v. p. 345.
2 Evolution of Religion, pp. 139-152.
140 GREECE AND BABYLON
principle of the Babylonian law of murder. But, as
we have seen, we discern here only the secular result :
the religious force that may have worked towards it is
too far removed in the background of the past. Sum-
marily, we must conclude that the political application
of Hellenic religion seems wholly a native and in-
dependent product of the Hellenic spirit, and reflected
the characteristically Hellenic forms of civic life.
CHAPTER VIII.
RELIGION AND MORALITY.
THE comparison must also consider the relation in these
various societies between religion and morality, both
social and individual. From this point of view, as we
are dealing with the second millennium only, it must be
a comparison mainly between the Mesopotamian and
the Hellenic ; for except for a few Hittite letters that
reveal little, there is no evidence concerning our races
of the west of Asia Minor, since monuments can scarcely
be direct witnesses concerning ethics ; at least, the Asia
Minor monuments are not, and we must await the
further discovery and interpretation of Hittite literature.
For the proto-Hellenic period also, it may be said, we
have no explicit and direct evidence. But we have
Homer, whose poems belong to the end of that period
and the beginning of the second ; and we cannot suppose
that the average morality that they represent had all
grown up in the century before them, still less that
Homer had discovered it as an original teacher. There-
fore, cautiously and critically handled, his poems throw
some light on the moral facts of the centuries behind
them. There is also some evidence to be gleaned from
the rich field of Greek mythology and cult ; only we
must realise that we rarely can determine the date of
the rise of an old Hellenic legend or the institution of
an old Hellenic cult. The Mesopotamian evidence,
142 GREECE AND BABYLON
then, is direct and explicit, depending solely on the
right interpretation of documents ; the Hellenic evi-
dence concerning the earliest period is indirect and often
hypothetical.
A careful study of all the sources will allow this
induction, that the deities of this period in both societies
are on the side of whatever morality is current, inspiring
it, protecting it, and avenging the breach of it ; we
are dealing, in fact, with a religion of personal moral
powers. Concerning the Mesopotamian, this is a trite
observation to make ; the most superficial glance of a
few hymns confirms it. Shamash is the great god of
justice, the protector of the weak; Enlil " destroyeth
the evil-minded " ; 1 Ishtar judges the cause according
to right she maintains the right of the oppressed and
the downcast ; Righteousness and Judgment are the
sons of Shamash. Ga-tum-duga, "she who produces
good," is an appellative of Bau. 2 And yet this is not
the whole account. The destructive and evil character
of some of the deities in Mesopotamia occasionally
appears in the hymns, and is expressed apparently in
certain titles. This might be the case at times when
those deities are addressed that were powers of death
and the lower world; for instance, Nergal, the lord
of destruction; Isum, a little-known deity to whom
a phrase is attached that is said to mean " the exalted
murderer/' 3 And this might be explained by the fact
that these powers personified, as it were, the baneful
forces of nature, or, as perhaps in the case of Martu, whom
Jeremias cites as one of the evil gods, were aliens. 4
1 Zimmern, Babylonische Hymnen und Gebete, p. 20.
2 Pinches, op. cii^ p. 77.
3 Vide Jeremias, Bab. Assyr. Vorstellungen vom Leben nach dem
Tode, p. 68,
4 Zimmern, K.A.T.*, pp. 433-434.
RELIGION AND MORALITY 143
We find also the name of an obscure deity, " Ira/'
who was a god of pestilence, and at times identified
with Nergal ; x but that a direct cult was attached to
him in this baneful character is not shown. And it is
unlikely that any Babylonian deity was worshipped
definitely as an evil power : moral speculation could
always explain the evU that .he appeared to work as a
punishment for sin or as righteous vengeance on the
enemy ; that is to say, the evil element becomes
moralised, and the worshipper is always convinced that
the god can become good to him. Thus in the same
context Nergal is called the " Lord of Destruction/'
and yet he is " the god of the little ones, he of the
beneficent visage/' 2 The dark storm-god Adad, before
whose wrath the high gods rise up in terror, the pitiless
one, can yet be implored as " the merciful among
the great gods." 3 This transformation, by which a
destructive nature-power could become a benevolent
being, follows a law of religious psychology, which
expresses itself in the quasi-magical phraseology of
prayer. The worshipper wishes to get some good
from his deity or some mercy : therefore he calls him
good and merciful, feeling that such spell-words con-
strain the god to be so ; and belief will arise from the
continual repetition of formulae. Therefore, by the
time our record begins, all the deities that the Baby-
lonian and Assyrian worshipped are beneficent on the
whole : the Epic of Creation supposes the existence of
primeval bad powers, but these had been conquered,
and some pardoned, by Marduk. The evil personal
agencies that remained active were demons, and these
1 Zimmern, op. cit., pp. 412, 587.
2 Langdon, op. cit. t p. 83.
4 Reseller, Lexikon, vi. p. 47, s.v. *' Ramman."
144 GREECE AND BABYLON
were not worshipped, but exorcised or averted by the
good gods. 1
And this may serve as a fairly accurate description
of the moral character of Greek religion at that stage
of development where Homer presents it to us. The
high deities are worshipped on the whole as moral beings
and as beneficent : that is, as the guardians of the social
morality of the period, whatever that was. The usual
popular writer does not perceive this, because he is
always liable to the error of confusing mythology with
worship, and supposing that if the mythology is licentious
or immoral, the deity is worshipped in that character.
All students of mythology and religion are aware that
this is false. We might be able to show that the religious
imagination and statement of Homer at times fall below
the level of contemporary cult, at times rise above it.
At any rate, he is evidently addressing a world of re-
ligious-minded people, who impute their own moral
ideals to their highest divinities, especially to their
high god Zeus. TS'sptffig, the social feeling of indigna-
tion which is at the psychic basis of social morality,
is the common emotion excited both in gods and men
by the same acts ; and though much of Greek religion
was still not yet penetrated with morality, the higher
personal gods were generally regarded as on the side of
righteousness. One or two Greek myths, such as that
of Prometheus, as Hesiod narrates it, might suggest
that the deity was not necessarily conceived as the
friend, but sometimes even as the enemy, of man. But
Hesiod's narrative does not strike us as primitive or
1 Certain other minor powers or daimones, such as the corn-deity,
the Lord of Watercourses (Shuqamunu), may have remained pureiy
" functional/* and have acquired no moral attributes beyond the
beneficent exercises of their special function. But the habitual
Babylonian tendency is to moralise all the gods and goddesses.
RELIGION AND MORALITY 145
popular ; and, at any rate, such a view is inconsistent
with the earliest stage of worship that we can discover
or surmise. The poets and philosophers might dislike
Ares ; but the Hellenes, who worshipped him, did not
worship him as an evil god, with apotropaeic rites :
nor is it proved or likely that any deity to whom actual
service was paid, was regarded as in his nature male-
ficent by his worshippers. The dread powers of the
lower world were also givers of vegetation. The Erinyes
had scarcely a recorded cult, and their wrath was
moralised as righteous indignation ; nor was ghost-cult,
when it arose, merely a service of terror and aversion.
It is a striking confirmation of the view here expressed,
that among the very long list of cult-appellatives attached
to the Greek divinities, some of which have a moral
value, there are only two doubtful examples of an evil
connotation attaching to the word. 1
We may affirm generally, then, that the Meso-
potamian and Hellenic religions are more or less on the
same level of thought in respect of the moral and benefi-
cent character of the deities. But careful study of
the Hellenic will give us the impression that the terrible
and destructive power of divinity is far less emphasised
by cult than it was in the Eastern Semitic world.
Every deity might be dangerous if neglected, and cer-
tainly would be if insulted. The idea of the " jealous
god " is non-moral, and can easily become immoral :
that is, it tends to divorce the conception of the divine
character from the purely human moral ideal. And this
idea is palpable not only in the Hellenic and Meso-
potamian, but still more in the Judaic religion, and our
own religion is not yet delivered from it. But apart
1 * A.<f>poSLT7) dvdpo(j>6vos or d^crios, Cults, ii. p. 665, and
dv0pu'jroppal<m}s, ib. f v. p. 156.
IO
146 GREECE AND BABYLON
from this, the Hellenic imagination, so far as we can
discern it, even in its infancy, did not construct manifold
forms of fear out of the dangerous powers in the nature-
world, and worship them with the higher forms of cult.
We do not come upon aboriginal thunder gods and
storm gods per se (I use the term " god " advisedly) :
Zeus the thunderer had been civilised and moralised
before Homer's time. Poseidon had always his wild
side as god of storms and earthquakes ; and to the end
he remains rather more a non-moral nature-power than
the others ; but destructive force was certainly not
the centre of his personality, and in the pre-historic
days he had become the father of the Minyan and Ionic
people, and the guardian of their family life. The
wind-powers might develop into beneficent gods or
ancestors ; or might occasionally be regarded from
the lower standpoint of polydaimonism, and averted by
magical means. The higher Hellenic religion did not
admit such beings as " Ira/* the god of pestilence,
or a special god of storms or earthquakes, and it is far
less than the Babylonian a religion of fear. This differ-
ence will emerge more clearly in the study of ritual.
One more difference strikes us in comparing the ethical
character of the two religions. The Greek high divinity
is a moral being, but not every divinity was moralised
to such an extent as were the higher powers of Meso-
potamia. A few Hellenic deities remain ethically un-
developed and crude, Ares, for instance, and in a certain
sense Hestia. A salient example is the contrast between
the fire-god Hephaistos and the Babylonian-Sumerian
Nusku or Girru. 1 Both are elemental powers of fire,
both are therefore concerned with the arts of metal-
work; but Hephaistos remains a handicraftsman, and
1 Zimmern, K.A.T,*, pp. 416-418 ; Jastrow, op, cit., pp. 297, 4 8 7-
RELIGION AND MORALITY 147
has little or nothing to do with moral life ; whereas
the Babylonian deity acquires an exalted moral and
spiritual character. Dionysos becomes a most potent
force in the later Hellenic world ; yet an irrepressible
vein of wildness and a spirit that refuses to conform
to the ethical ideal of Hellas remains in him. A god
so highly placed at Babylon would have been clothed
with moral attributes in many an ecstatic phrase of
temple liturgy.
It would be interesting to go more into detail con-
cerning the special moral virtues consecrated by the two
religions, or the various moral attributes specially at-
tributed to the divinities. Such a study would demand
two long treatises on Greek and Babylonian ethics. I
have only time and power to indicate here a few points.
The peoples of the old world show many general points
of resemblance with each other in their moral ideas, and
as compared with ourselves many salient points of
difference. And moral statistics have rarely any value
for proving the influence of one race upon another. As
the Babylonian society was more complex in the second
millennium than was the Hellenic, so must its morality
have been ; but it will not be found futile from the point
of view of our main purpose to compare the two in respect
of some special virtues, as we have already compared them
incidentally in regard to the ideas about homicide.
The idea of the sin of perjury belongs to the earliest
stage of religious ethic, and is the starting-point of
much moral evolution. It is magical in its origin ;
for the oath-taker enters into communion with the
divinity, by touching some sacred object or eating
sacred food charged with divine power, which, being
now within him, will blast him if he forswears. This
dangerous power becomes interpreted as the anger
148 GREECE AND BABYLON
of the deity by whom the person swears falsely. Hence
the belief arose in early Mesopotamia and Greece, and
generally in the cults of personal gods, that they punish
perjury as a dire offence : such punishment will fall
on the community or individual, and often on both :
therefore a social moral instinct arises against perjury.
This might develop into a moral idea among a pro-
gressive people that truthfulness, quite apart from the
ritual of the oath, was dear to God in any case, and was
therefore a religious virtue. And of this religious virtue
attaching to truthfulness, however it came to attach,
we have evidence in a Babylonian ritual of confession ;
before the evil demon can be exorcised, the priest
asked certain questions of the penitent, and twice he
asks, "Has he said, yea for nay, and nay for yea? " 1
But in no Hellenic record have I ever been able to find
a religious parallel to this. The Hellenic religious spirit
was most sensitive in respect to perjury, and no religion
ever reprobated it more. In regard to ordinary truth-
fulness, Hellenic religion had nothing to say, no message
to give, and Hellenic ethics very little. In the poetic story,
Athena smiles on the audacious mendacities of Odysseus,
and Hermes loves the liar Autolykos. Not that the religion
consecrated mendacity, only it failed to consecrate truth.
It is only the great Achilles who hates with the hate
of hell the man who says one thing with his tongue and
hides another thing in his heart. 2 This is the voice
of northern honour, but it has no religious import.
The ideas connected with perjury have this further
value for the history of ethics, that they contributed
much to the growth of international morality. It is
1 Weber, DdmonenbescTiwoyung bei den Babyloniern und Assyrevn,
p. 8.
RELIGION AND MORALITY 149
often supposed that the earliest morality is merely tribal
or clannish, and that in respect of the alien it is non-
existent ; but this account of morality is false wherever
perjury is found to be a sin. For one great occasion
for oath-taking is a treaty or a contract with an alien
power. And Homer is our witness that it was considered
an immoral act for either Achaeans or Trojans to break
their mutual oath. And this early idea of international
morality inspires the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence
and the Hittite treaty with Rameses. International
morality also includes the duty of hospitality, and the
pre-Homeric world had developed this moral sense
strongly, and no doubt through the aid of religion ; the
stranger who puts himself into communion with Hestia,
the holy hearth, or with Zeus Xenios, has a moral
right to protection, and the abduction of Helen was
regarded as a sin on the part of Paris against Zeus the
god of the guest-right. I have not yet been able to find
a cult-concept in Babylonian religion parallel to that
of Zeus Xenios, or any reference to hospitality as a
sacred duty ; yet we know that this was and is as
highly regarded by some Semitic races as it ever was
by the Hellenic. We may suspect, however, that as
Babylonian society was in many respects very modern and
complex, the religious sanction of hospitality had decayed.
Looking now at the moral code as regulating the
relations of members of the same tribe or community,
we cannot doubt that clan-morality was already highly
developed in the proto-Hellenic period : the rights and
duties of kinsmen are the basis of this morality, and these
were consecrated by the worship around the altar of
Zeus " in the courtyard/' which may have been a primi-
tive religious gathering-place for the kinsfolk of the early
Aryan household. Homer is our first witness for the
150 GREECE AND BABYLON
cult of Zeus 'Epxtiog,' 1 but it is evident that it had been
long in existence before his time. The earliest moral
duty that the tie of kinship imposes is the maintenance
of peace and goodwill, and as the kindreds grow into a
political community, this becomes the basis of political
morality and the corner-stone of the religion of the city.
The Homeric age, and probably their predecessors, have
attained this ethical religious idea ; and though Homer
is the first to give voice to it, we will not suppose that he
discovered it : " outcast from clan, from holy law, and
holy hearth is he who longs for bitter battle among the
people of his own township/' 2 And to this early age
we must also impute the religious morality of the mono-
gamic family : the son fears the curse of the father and of
the mother, even of the elder brother : " thou knowest
that the powers of judgment defend the right of the elder-
born" Iris says warningly to Poseidon. 8 The Erinyes
are specially charged with the preservation of the
morality of the family and clan, and with the punishment
of the two chief offences against the sacred blood of the
kin, murder and incest. Of the first, enough has been
said ; the religious view of the earliest Greeks concerning
the second is first attested by Homer, who mentions
" the woes of Oedipus that the Furies of his mother
bring to pass for him " ; 4 he is thinking more of the
incestuous marriage than of the parricide. As regards
ordinary adultery, it is only from the later period of
Greek literature that we hear protests against it as a
sin, though the sentiment of moral indignation against
the adulterer is no doubt pre-Homeric. One or two
Greek myths that may reflect very early thought express
the severe reprobation on the part of the father of
1 Od., 22, 334. 2 IL> g> 63
3 //., 15, 204. * Od., ii, 280.
RELIGION AND MORALITY 151
unchastity in his unmarried daughter ; myths telling
of cruel sentences of death imposed for the offence.
But these suggest no religious feeling ; the sentiment
may well have arisen from the fact that under the
patriarchal system the virgin-daughter was the more
marriageable and commanded a higher bride-price.
Looking at the code of family and social duties in the
ethical religion of Babylon, of which the private peni-
tential hymns and confessional ritual of exorcism are the
chief witnesses, we find no figures whose concept and
function remind us at all of the Erinyes, the curse-
powers on the side of righteousness ; but there is evidence
in the literature of a famity morality more advanced
and more articulate than the primitive Greek. Among
the sins mentioned in the ritual of confession, alluded to
above, those indicated by the following questions are of
interest : " Has he caused variance between father and
son, mother and daughter, father-in-law and daughter-
in-law, brother and brother, friend and friend, partner
and partner? Has he conceived hatred against his
elder brother, has he despised his father and mother,
insulted his elder sister ? " 1 All these acts of social
misconduct are supposed to give a man into the posses-
sion of the evil demon, which must be exorcised before
God will admit him to his fellowship again. Though
magical ideas are operative in the ceremony, yet we
discern here a high religious morality. And among the
other moral offences clearly considered as sins in the
same formula are such as shedding one's neighbour's
blood, committing adultery with one's neighbour's wife,
stealing from one's neighbour. We find also a certain
morality in the matter of property and commerce given
a religious sanction in this text : " Thou shalt not
i Weber, op. cit. t p. 8.
152 GREECE AND BABYLON
remove thy neighbour's landmark " was a religious law
in ancient Babylonian ethics as in our present liturgy ;
it would appeal to the Hellene who reverenced Zeus
"Opiog; and there are reasons for believing this cult-idea
to have been in vogue very early in Greece. The Baby-
lonian code also recognises the sin of using false measure
or false coin. And the confessional liturgy agrees in
many points with the famous hymn to Shamash, where
phrases occur such as " Shamash hates him who falsifies
boundaries and weights"; "Shamash hates the adul-
terer." x It excites our envy also, by stamping as sins
certain unpatriotic acts, such as " the spreading a bad
report concerning one's city/' or " bringing one's city
into evil repute/'
We may say, then, that we find a high degree of
morality in early Greece, a still higher at a still earlier
period in Babylon, and both are obviously indigenous
and natural products. And both reveal the pheno-
menon that marks an early stage of social morality : as
the tribe or the family are one flesh, one corporate unit
of life, so the members are collectively responsible, and
" the sins of the fathers are visited on the children."
This was the familiar law of old Hellas, and we may say
of the ancient Mediterranean society ; the first to make
the momentous protest against it, and to proclaim the
responsibility of the individual conscience, was Theognis
for the Hellenes and Ezekiel for the Hebrews. The
Babylonian, advanced in moral thought as he was, had
not escaped the bondage of the older clan-faith : in an
incantation-hymn to Marduk, 2 the man who is seeking
deliverance prays " may the sins of my father, of my
grandfather, my mother, my grandmother, my family,
1 Gray, SamaS Religious Texts (British Museum), Hymn i.
2 Zimmern, Babylonische Hymnen u. Gebete, p. 18.
RELIGION AND MORALITY 153
my whole circle of kindred, not come near me, may they
depart from iny side."
One other characteristic of earty moral thought
and feeling is that the sense of sin is not wholly ethical
according to our modern criteria, but is partly regarded
as something external to the will and purpose, some-
thing inherent in certain acts or substances of which the
performance or the contagion renders a man a sinner.
Thus in the Babylonian confessional liturgy and hymns
of penitence, while there is much that would appeal
to the most delicate moral consciousness, and is on
the same level with the most spiritual passages in the
Hebrew psalms, there is also a strong admixture of what
is alien and non-moral. The confessional formula l
asks a man, for instance, " whether he has sat in the
chair of a person under a ban/' that is, " a man forbid/'
a person impure and under a curse ; tc whether he has
met him, has slept in his bed, has drunk from his cup."
In one of the penitential hymns that might be addressed
to any god, " to the god that I know, and to the god
that I do not know/ 1 as the formula expresses it, we
find such sorrowful confessions as " without knowing
it, I have eaten of that which is abominable in the sight
of my god : without knowing it, I have trodden on
that which is filthy in the sight of my goddess " ; " my
sins are many, great is my transgression/ 3 2 This must
be taken quite literally : contact with unclean things
or with unclean persons, eating of forbidden food, is
put in the same category with serious offences against
social morality, and all these expose a man equally
to the power of the evil demon and to the loss of his
God's protection. And this is a half-civilised develop-
ment in Babylonian psychology of the primeval savage
1 Weber, op. cit., p. 9. 2 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 23.
I 5 4 GREECE AND BABYLON
law of tabu : nor, as I think, is there yet any proof that
the people of the Blesopotamian culture ever attained to
the highest plane of ethical enlightenment ; the later Zara-
thustrian religion of the Persian domination is strongly
fettered by this ritualistic morality, in which the distinc-
tion between that which is morally wrong and that
which is physically unclean, is never clearly apprehended.
This mental attitude is supported in the older and
later Mesopotamian system by a vivid polydaimonism ;
the evil demon is on the alert to destroy the family
and the individual ; and where the demon is in possession
the god departs. As the demon takes advantage of
every accidental act, whether conscious or unconscious,
the idea arises in the over-anxious spirit that one cannot
be sure when or how often one has sinned, and all illness
or other misfortune is attributed to some unknown
offence. 1 The utterance of the Hebrew psalmist, " who
can tell how oft he offendeth : cleanse Thou me from
my secret faults," may express the intense sensitiveness
of a very spiritual morality, or it may be merely ritualistic
anxiety. This latter is certainly the explanation of the
strikingly similar phrases in a Babylonian penitential
hymn " the sins that I have done I know not ;
the trespass that I have committed I know not." 2
The feeling of sin is here deep and very moving " take
away from me my wickedness as a cloak . . . my God,
though my sins be seven times seven, yet undo my sins " ;
yet the context that illustrates this passionate outpouring
of the heart, shows that the sin might be such as the
accidental stepping on filth. Such ideas, allowed to
obsess the mind, easily engender despondency and
1 " I have sinned and am therefore ill," is the conventional formula
in the confessional exorcism (Zimmern, op. cit., p. 26).
3 Zimmern, op. cit., pp. 23-24.
RELIGION AND MORALITY 155
pessimism ; and this tone is heard and once or twice is
very marked in some of the most striking products of
Babylonian religious poetry ; for instance, in the peni-
tential hymn just quoted from, the poet sorrowfully
exclaims : " Men are dumb, and of no understanding :
all men who live on the earth, what do they understand ?
Whether they do right, ,&T wrong, they understand
nothing/' But the strangest example of this is a lyric
of lamentation that reminds us vividly of the book of
Job, found in the library of Assurbanipal, and of great
antiquity and of wide vogue, as Zimmern shows. 1 It
is a masterpiece of the poetry of pessimism : the theme
is the sorrow and tribulation of the righteous who has
served God faithfully all his life, and feels at the last
that he has had no profit of it ; and his main thought
is expressed in the lines, " If I only knew that such things
were pleasing before God ; but that which seems good
to a man's self, is evil in the sight of God : and that
which according to each man's sense is to be despised,
is good in the sight of his God. Who can understand the
counsel of the Gods in heaven ? A god's plan is full of
darkness, who hath searched it out ? "
It is easy in all this to detect the intimate associa-
tions with Biblical thought and feeling ; and we may
trace back to Babylon the daimonistic theory of morals
that colours the New Testament, and has prevailed
throughout the centuries of Christendom, and is only
slowly losing its hold. But at the same time all this
sharply divides early Babylonian thought from what
we can discern of the early Hellenic, and more than any
other evidence confirms the belief that the great Eastern
and Western races were not in close spiritual contact
at the time when Hellenism was in the making. Certain
1 Op. dt. t pp. 28-30.
156 GREECE AND BABYLON
external resemblances in the thought and feeling about
these matters are to be found in Hellas and in Meso-
potamia ; that is to say, the germs are identical, for
they are broadcast all over the world ; but the intensity
of their cultivation, and their importance in relation
to other life-forces, are immeasurably different. In the
earliest Greek legend we discover the reflex of that
external unpurposive morality that I have tried to
define above : the acts of Oedipus were not according
to our moral judgment ethically wrong, for they were
wholly unintentional : yet in the oldest legend he is
&$ avuyvog, as he calls himself in Sophocles' play,
and a sinner in the eyes of the gods ; nor could all the
virtue and valour of Bellerophon save him from the
wrath of heaven aroused by the accidental slaying of
his brother. Certain acts were supposed to put upon
a man a quasi-physical, quasi-spiritual miasma, without
reference to will or purpose, and render him hateful to
God and man. But the bondage of the Greek mind to
this idea was slighter and more temporary. And after
all, the external sins in these legends were parricide,
incest, and fratricide, dreadful things enough in them-
selves. We do not hear of any Hellene's agony of remorse
on account of treading accidentally on filth, or eating
malodorous food. Homer, indeed, is marvellously un-
troubled by any ritualistic pharisaic code ; we might
even take him as a witness that there was none at all
in earliest Hellas. We should be undoubtedly wrong.
The early Greek must have had, like all mankind, his
"tabus " in plenty ; for to suppose that all that we find
in Hesiod and in the later inscriptions were a sudden
discovery, would be childish. I may be able to consider
the evidence concerning early Greek tabus when I
compare the ritual. I will only say here that we have
RELIGION AND MORALITY 157
reason to believe that at no period was the Hellene
morbidly perturbed about these, or ever moralised them
up to that point where they could exercise a spiritual
tyranny over his moral sense. He might object to
touching a corpse or to approaching an altar with blood
upon him ; but it does not seem to have occurred to him,
as it did to the Persian, and with almost equal force to
the Babylonian, that accidental contact with an impure
thing instantly started into existence an army of demons,
who would rush abroad to destroy ihe world of right-
eousness. 1
In fact, Hellenic tabus and purification-laws, except,
indeed, the law concerning purification from bloodshed,
had only this contact with religion, that the breach of
them might offend an irritable divinity, which it would
be unwise to do ; they were not religious, so far as we
can discern, in the sense that they were associated
with a vivid belief in evil spirits, as they were in the
Babylonian and Persian creeds. There were germs
indeed which might have developed into a vigorous
daimonistic theory in early Hellas. We hear even in
Homer of such unpleasant things as " a black Ker " ;
and a mythic hero of Megara kills a monster called a
nowy, almost, we may say, a devil. Certain days,
according to Hesiod, might be unlucky, because perhaps
Erinyes or ghosts were walking about, though that
popular poet is not clear about this. But certainly
not in early nor often in later Greece were men habitu-
ally devil-ridden : nor did they see devils in food or
blood or mud. Therefore, on the whole and com-
paratively, early Greek religion, when we first catch
a glimpse of it, appears bright and sane, a religion of
the healthy-minded and of men in the open air. And
1 Vide my Evolution of Religion, p. 128.
158 GREECE AND BABYLON
therefore, when secular philosophy arose, Greek moral
theory made no use of evil spirits except in certain
Pythagorean circles where we may detect Oriental
influence. Superstition and magic must have been
more rife in ancient Greece than the Homeric picture
would lead us to suppose : yet the higher culture of
the people, in the earliest period which we are
considering, was comparatively free from these in-
fluences and refused to develop by religious specula-
tion or anxious brooding the germs of daimonism
always embedded in the lower stratum of the national
mind. The Universe could not, therefore, be viewed
by the Hellene as it was by the Zarathustrian, and to
some extent by the Babylonian, as the arena of a cosmic
struggle between the powers of good and the powers
of evil. Nor could the Hellene personify the power
of evil majestically, in such a guise as Ahriman or
Satan ; he only was aware of certain little daemon-
figures of death and disease, ghostly shadows rather
than fully outlined personages ; or such vaguely con-
ceived personal agencies as Ate and Eris, which belonged
not to religion, but to the poetic-moral thought of the
people. When we compare the various rituals, we
shall discern that the Hellenic was by no means wholly
bright or shallow, but that some of its most ancient
forms were gloomy and inspired by a sense of sin or
sorrow : nevertheless, it is just in respect of the com-
parative weakness of this sense that it differed most
markedly from the Babylonian.
There are other aspects of the divine character
interesting to compare in the religious theory of East
and West. Despite the apparent grimness of the
Babylonian-Assyrian theology, no divine trait is more
movingly insisted on in the liturgies than the merciful-
RELIGION AND MORALITY 159
ness of the deity : Nebo is " the merciful, the gracious " ; l
Ishtar is " the mighty lady of the world, queen of
humanity, merciful one, whose favour is propitious,
who hath received my prayer " ; 2 Sarpanitum is
addressed as " the intercessor, the protectress of the
captive " ; 3 Shamash as " the merciful god, who liftest
up those that are bowed down and protectest the
weak " ; 4 Sin as " the compassionate, gracious Father " ;
and " Gamlat the merciful " is mentioned as a descriptive
general epithet of an unknown Assyrian deity. 5
These phrases may attest in the end a genuine and
fervent faith ; but originally they were probably inspired
by the word-magic of penitence, the sinner believing
that he can make the deity merciful by repeatedly
calling him so. At any rate, Babylonian religion
catches thus the glow of a high ethical ideal ; and as
the deities were invoked and regarded as by nature
merciful, so the private man was required at certain
times to show mercy, as the confessional formula proves.
The same idea, though a less fervent and ecstatic ex-
pression is given to it, is found in the oldest record of
Greek religion : " Even the gods are moved to pity . . .
them men turn aside from wrath by sacrifice, libation,
and gentle prayers, when a man hath sinned and tres-
passed against them. For prayers are the daughters
of great God, . . . and if a man do them honour when
they come anigh him, to him they bring great blessings,
and hear him when he prayeth." This Homeric utter-
1 Roscher, Lexikon, iii. p. 49.
2 Langdon, op. cit., p. 269.
3 Jastrow, op. cit., p. 536. For the idea of the goddess as the
pleader for man before the high god, cf . the prayer of Ashurbanapal
to Ninlil (Jastrow, p. 525).
4 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 15 ; *&. p. n.
5 Jastrow, op. cit. t p. 200.
160 GREECE AND BABYLON
ance in the great speech of Phoenix 1 is the voice of a
high and civilised religion ; and the idea inspires the
ancient cults of Zeus (jbtikfyog and izmog.
The Babylonian conception of divine mercy gave
rise to an interesting phrase which is attached as a
quasi-liturgical formula to many of the leading gods
and goddesses "the awakener of the dead," "thou
who raisest up the dead " : a phrase which has errone-
ously been supposed to refer to an actual resurrection
of the dead : 2 various contexts attest its real signifi-
cance as an expression of the divine grace shown in
restoring the sick to health, in saving men from the
hand of death. Hellenic religious vocabulary affords
no parallel to this formula nor to that title of Enlil
" Lord of the breath of life of Sumer " ; 3 or that of
Bel, " Lord of the life of the Land." 4 In some passages
of Babylonian literature we mark the glimmering of
the idea that life in its varied forms on the earth is
a divine substance sustained by the personal deity.
Ishtar is described as the protectress of all animate
existence, and all life languishes when she descends
to the nether regions. 5 The goddess of Erech, identified
with Ishtar, speaking of her own functions, exclaims,
" In the place of giving birth in the house of the be-
getting mother, guardian of the home am I." 6 It is
specially Tammuz who, by the side of Ishtar, imper-
sonates the life of the soil, as appears in the striking
refrain recurring in his hymn of lament : " When he
slumbers, the sheep and the lambs slumber also ;
1 n., 9, 497 J cf. my Cults, 1 pp. 72-73, 75-77.
2 Vide Jeremias in Reseller's Lexikon, ii. p. 2355.
3 Langdon, op. cit., p. 225.
4 Jastrow, op. cit. t p. 490.
5 Ib., p. 529.
6 Langdon, op. cit., p. 3.
RELIGION AND MORALITY 161
when he slumbers, the she-goats and the kids slumber
also " ; x and the same thought may have inspired
a phrase that is doubtfully translated at the end of
the hymn : " In the meadows, verily, verily, the soul
of life perishes/ 1 Still more explicit is another Tam-
muz hymn, in which, while bewailing the departed god,
they wail for all the life of the earth, " the wailing is
for the herbs ; . . . they are not produced : the wailing
is for the grain, ears are not produced : the wailing is for
the habitations, for the flocks, the flocks bring forth
no more. The wailing is for the perishing wedded ones,
for the perishing children ; the dark-headed people
create no more/'
In all this we see the reflection of a pantheistic
feeling that links the living world and the personal
divine power in a mystic sympathy. Now the idea
of divinity immanent in living nature is inconsistent
with a severely defined anthropomorphic religion ;
hence we scarcely find it in the earlier religion of Hellas.
Zeus is called the father of men and gods, but in a
reverential rather than in any literal creative sense :
nor is there found any trace of the idea that divine
power is immanent in the life or soul of man, till we come
to the later period of philosophic speculation and
Orphism. Only here and there behind the anthropo-
morphism we discern in Hellenic myth or cult the
vaguer thought of diffused and immanent divinity;
this reveals itself more than once in the myth and cult
of Demeter, whose anger and sorrow at the loss of her
daughter causes a sympathetic disappearance of the
crops and the fruits of the earth ; and it is embodied
in the Attic cult on the Akropolis of Demeter XXop?, 2
which title expresses the immanence in the verdure of
1 Langdon, op. cit. t p. 319. 2 Cults, iii. p. 33.
i6z GREECE AND BABYLON
the life-giving potency of the goddess. The ancient
folklore of Greece, and a few cult-records of the primitive
village-communities, reveal figures that recall faintly
the lineaments of Tammuz, Eunostos of Tanagra,
Skephros of Tegea, who may belong, as Linos certainly
did, to that group of heroes of crop and harvest, who
die and are bewailed in the fall of the year, and whose
life is sympathetically linked with the life of the earth.
But we find this type of personage in other parts of
Europe, and there is every reason for believing that
the western shores of the Mediterranean had not been
touched by the Tammuz-myth and service in the second
millennium B.C.
The evidence then suggests that the pregnant idea
of the godhead as the source of life was more prominent
and more articulate in Babylonian than in Hellenic
religion.
CHAPTER IX.
PURITY A DIVINE ATTRIBUTE.
WE may next consider the attribute of purity as a
divine characteristic, to see whether in this respect
the East differed markedly from the West. As regards
ritual-law, all the religions of the old world agree in
demanding ritual-purity : the worshipper who ap-
proaches the deities must be free from physical taint
and impurity : this idea is so world-wide and so deeply
embedded in primitive thought, that the mere presence of
it is of no service for proving the interdependence of
any religions in the historic period. From this ritual-
law the concept naturally arises of " pure gods," deities
who themselves are believed to be pure because they
insist on purity in their worshippers. Marduk is called
(( the purifier " in one of the incantation-texts, in allusion
to his power of exorcising the evil demon of sickness
by cleansing processes. 1 The cathartic rules that the
law of ritual prescribes will differ according to the
instincts and prejudices of different societies. But the
Babylonian service demanded more than mere ritual-
purity ; for instance, in a fragment of a striking text
published by Delitsch, we find this injunction : " In the
sight of thy God thou shalt be pure of heart, for that
is the distinction of the Godhead." 2
1 Reseller, Lexikon, ii p, 2354.
2 Vide Jeremias, Die Culfus-Tafel von Sippar, p. 29.
163
164 GREECE AND BABYLON
As regards the moral and spiritual sense of purity,
the sense in which we speak of " purity of heart," we
should naturally include purity in respect of sexual
indulgence. But in applying this test to the Meso-
potamian religion we are confronted with a singular
difficulty. In the first place, the mythology is strikingly
pure in our modern sense of the word, so far as the
materials have as yet been put before us. It agrees
in this respect with the Hebraic, and differs markedly
from the Hellenic ; the gods live in monogamic marriage
with their respective goddesses, and we have as yet
found no licentious stories of their intrigues. It may
be that generally the Babylonian imagination was
restrained by an austerity and shy reverence that did
not control the more reckless and lighter spirit of the
Hellene ; or it may be that the priestly and royal
scribes, to whom we owe the whole of the Babylonian
religious literature that has come down to us, deliberately
excluded any element of licentiousness that they may
have found in the lower folklore. But there is one
curious exception. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero
repulses the proffered love of Ishtar, and taunts her with
her cruel amours, giving a long list of her lovers whom
she had ruined : one of these is Tammuz, " the spouse
of thy youth/' upon whom " thou didst lay affliction
every year " : then he mentions her other lovers who
suffered at her hands a singular list : a bird, a lion, a
horse, a shepherd of the flock, some Babylonian Paris
or Anchises, whom Ishtar treated as Artemis treated
Aktaion. We must suppose these allusions are drawn
from Babylonian folklore, of which nothing else has
survived, concerning the amorous adventures of the
goddess. Hence modern accounts are apt to impute
a licentious character to Ishtar, as a goddess of violent
PURITY A DIVINE ATTRIBUTE 165
and lawless passion, and to connect with this aspect
of her the institution in her temple at Erech of the
service of sacred prostitutes, attested by certain cunei-
form texts. In comparing the ritual of East and West,
I shall give some consideration to this phenomenal
practice. But this view of Ishtar is utterly contrary
to that presented of her in the hymns and liturgies.
Not only are certain hymns to Ishtar transcendently
noble and spiritual in tone, surpassing most of the
greatest works of Babylonian religious poetry, but certain
phrases specially exalt her as the virgin-goddess. In
one of the lamentations we read, "Virgin, virgin, in the
temple of my riches, am I/' x " The spirit-maid, glory
of Heaven : the Maiden Ishtar, glory of Heaven." 2
In a psalm to Nana, one of the by-names of Ishtar,
she is called " Virgin-goddess of Heaven " ; 3 in another
she speaks of herself, " she of the pure heart, she without
fear was I." 4 This virgin-character of hers must
then be regarded as fixed by such epithets and phrases,
of which more examples might no doubt be found.
Therefore the phrase attached to her in the Epic of
Gilgamesh, 5 " Kadisti Hani," must not be translated
as Dhorme would translate it, 6 "the courtesan of the
Gods," merely on the ground that the same word is
applied to her temple-harlots : for the word properly
means " pure " from stain, hence " holy/* 7 and in this
latter sense it could be applied to her consecrated
votaries, in spite of their service, which seems to us
1 Langdon, op. cit., p. 191.
2 16., p. 193. 3 Ib., p. 289.
4 Ib., p. 3. 6 Tabl. 9,1, n.
6 Choix des textes religieux Assyrians Babylonians, p. 270.
7 Vide Zimmern, K.A.T.*, p. 423 ; but cf. Ms Beitrdge zuv Kenntniss
d. Babyl. Relig., ii p. 179, " trefflich 1st die grosse BuHe die herrliche
Istar."
166 GREECE AND BABYLON
impure : the same word " Kedesh " is used for the
votaries of the same ritual in Phoenicia and Syria. This
apparent contradiction in the conception of Ishtar's
character is sometimes explained I by the suggestion
that she was really a combination of two distinct
goddesses, a voluptuous and effeminate goddess of
Erech, and a pure and warlike Assyrian goddess of
Nineveh. But there is no real contradiction ; for in
Babylonian religious and liturgical literature the lower
view of Ishtar is never presented at all. She is always
worshipped as pure and holy ; the licentiousness of
folklore, if there was any such in vogue, was not
allowed to intrude into the temple-service. Therefore
Ishtar is no real exception to the rule that purity, even
in our sense, is a prevailing characteristic of Babylonian
divinity, as it was of the Hebraic.
But now another phenomenon claims our interest :
while being a virgin-goddess, she is sometimes addressed
as a mother. In the inscription of Sargon (722-705 B.C.)
she is described as " the Lady of the Heavenly Crown,
the Mother of the Gods " ;* and in some of the older
hymns, which have already been quoted, she speaks of
herself at one time as mother and at another as maid :
" Mother who knows lamentation/' and {( I am the
Virgin-Goddess/' 3 Similarly, in the hymn to Nana
she is called in one place " the Virgin-Goddess of Heaven " ;
in another, " Mother of the faithful breasts." 4 Another
goddess, Bau, who is eminently the mother or the
wife-goddess, the spouse of Ningirsu or Ninib, is char-
acterised in a hymn to the latter god as " thy spouse,
the maid, the Lady of Nippur." 5
1 E.g. by Dhorme, op. cit. - Keilinschr. BibL, ii. p. 47.
3 Langdon, op. c*t., p. n. 4 /&., p. 289.
6 Jastrow, op. cit., 460.
PURITY A DIVINE ATTRIBUTE 167
From these phrases, then, seems to emerge the
conception of a virgin-mother. Only we must not
press it too far, or suppose at all that it crystallised into
a dogma. It is characteristic of the ecstatic Babylonian
imagination that in the swoon of rapture the intellect
does not sharply hold contradictions apart, and the
mystic enthusiasm reconciles contrary ideas as fused
in one divine personality. Thus even a divinity natur-
ally and properly male, might be mystically addressed
as Father-Mother, for the worshipper craves that the
godhead should be all in all to him. Thus motherhood
is the natural function and interest of the goddess ;
therefore the Babylonian supplicated his goddess as
mother, even as mother of the gods, without thinking
of any divine offspring or of any literal genealogy or
theogony. Virginity is also beautiful, and a source
of divine power and virtue. Therefore the mother Bau
might rejoice to be addressed occasionally as maid.
As for Ishtar, she was aboriginally, perhaps, a maid,
in the sense that no god entered into her worship ; and
this idea shaped the early spiritual conception of her.
But as a great goddess she must show her power in the
propagation of life ; therefore she must be recognised
in prayer and supplication as a mother ; the adorer
wishing to give her the virtue of both states, probably
without dogmatising or feeling the contradiction. This
explanation appears more likely, when we consider
the psychologic temper of the Babylonian poetry, its
often incoherent rapture, than the other obvious one
that Ishtar the virgin happened in many places to
appropriate to herself the cult of a mother-goddess,
though this might easily happen.
As regards the other polytheistic Semitic races, we
can infer that the same religious ideas concerning ritual-
168 GREECE AND BABYLON
purity were in vogue ; but our scanty records do not
enable us to determine whether and how far they were
quickened by spiritual significance. 1 But we can trace
through Asia Minor the double concept of mother and
virgin in the personality of the goddesses ; though it is
difficult to decide whether they ever coincided, and with
what degree of definiteness, in the same personage.
Astarte must have been imagined generally as a mother-
goddess, and she appears conspicuously as the female
consort of Baal ; thus her Hellenic equivalent is often
given as Aphrodite ; yet in another aspect of her worship
she must have appeared as virginal, for she is also often
identified with Artemis, just as a similar goddess Anath in
Cyprus was identified with Athena. 2 The goddess Atar-
gatis of Hierapolis, described by Lucian, was evidently
a mother-goddess, bearing, according to him, a marked
resemblance to Rhea, and placed in the temple by the
side of her husband, Bel or Zeus. Among the Sabaean
inscriptions of South Arabia, we find a dedication by
some parents in behalf of their children to the goddess
Umm- Attar, a name that signifies " Mother- Attar >J (or
" Mother Astarte " 3 ) ; and a late record, too late to serve
as witness for the early period we are considering, speaks
of a virgin-mother among the Arabs. 4 Finally, the
earliest Carthaginian inscriptions record the cult of the
great goddess Tanit, addressed usually as the " Lady
Tanit, the Face of Baal/' and called in one dedication
" The Great Mother." 5 If she is the same as the divinity
whom Augustine describes as the Virgo Caelestis, the
1 Only a late Greek inscription from Berytos designates Baal as
the pure God 0e ayty (Dittenberger, Orient. Graec. Inscr., 590) .
2 Lagrange, Etttdes sur Us religions s&mitiques, p. 482.
3 Vide Weber, Arabien vor dem Islam, p. 18.
* Epiphanies, Panayium, 51 j cf. my Cults, ii. 629.
5 C. I. Sem., i, i, 195.
PURITY A DIVINE ATTRIBUTE 169
Heavenly Virgin, 1 then either the dual concept was
mystically combined in the same personage, or the
Carthaginian goddess was worshipped at different
times and at different seasons as the mother and then as
the maid. But the evidence is quite uncertain, and we
must not combine too rashly the records of different ages.
Looking at the non-Semitic races of Asia Minor, we
have noted the monumental evidence among the Hittites
for the worship of a mother-goddess, who with her son
figures in the procession on the reliefs at Boghaz-Keui.
It may be she who appears on a Hittite votive relief
as a large seated female with a child on her knees, 2 a type
which the Greeks would call %ovporpo<po$. Her name may
have been Umma ; for this divine word is now given us
among the names of Hittite divinities in cuneiform texts
recently discovered, which have been published and
interpreted by Professor Sayce in the Journal of the Royal
Asiatic Society* He there connects the word with the
Assyrian Umma = Mother, and regards this Hititte
goddess as the ancestress both by name and nature of the
Cappadocian goddess Ma, famous at Comana in the
later period. Now the name Ma designates C( the mother/'
and yet the Hellenes identified this goddess not only
with the great mother Kybele, but freely with Artemis.
I believe the external inducement to this latter assimila-
tion was the isolation of Ma in her cult, into which no
god entered. From this late evidence it is too hazardous
to infer an early Hittite virgin-mother, especially as the
processional relief at Boghaz-Keui seems to present us with
a /gpo yupog, the solemn union of a god and a goddess.
As regards the great goddess of the Asia-Minor coast, it
1 De Civ. Dei, 2, 4 ; of. Reseller, Lexikon, i., s.v. " Caelestis."
C.I.L., 8, 9796.
2 Perrot et Chipiez, op. cit. t iv. fig. 280.
3 Year 1909.
170 GREECE AND BABYLON
has been somewhat hastily concluded that here and
there her cult included the mystic idea of a virgin-
mother. We have only some evidence from a late period,
and in any case it would be a bold leap to argue back from
it to the second millennium. But the evidence is weak.
I have criticised it elsewhere, and I found it and still find
it very frail. 1 I have not been able to detect any clear
consciousness of the idea in the cult and cult-legends of
Kybele : we must not build much on the Pessinuntian
story that Arnobius gives us concerning her resistance
to the love of Zeus, for certainly the general legend of
Kybele and Attis is inconsistent with any dogma of
the goddess's virginity, nor was she ever called Hctp0'tvo$
in cult. She was rather the mother-goddess, with whom
the worshipper himself in a mystic ritual might be united
in corporeal union. 2
If we search the other parts of the Asia-Minor littoral,
neither in the prehistoric nor in the later periods before
Christianity is the concept we are seeking clearly to be
traced. I cannot find the Leto-Artemis, the goddess
who was at once essentially a virgin and a mother.
What we discern in Crete is a great mother-goddess
and a virgin, * Atpuict, or Britomartis, " the Sweet Maid."
That the prehistoric or later Cretans mystically com-
1 Vide Cults, iii pp. 305-306 ; Sir William Ramsay, in Amer.
Journ. Arch., 1887, p. 348, expressed his belief in the prevalence of the
cult of an Anatolian goddess in the later period, regarded as a virgin-
mother and named Artemis-Leto j the fact is merely that the goddess
Anaitis was usually identified with Artemis, but occasionally with
Leto ; but we nowhere find Artemis explicitly identified with Leto,
and the interpretation which he gives to the Messapian inscription
(Artamihi Latho[i], vide Rhein. Mu$., 1887, p. 232, Deeke) appears to
me unconvincing.
2 The fact that a part of her temple at Kyzikos was called Hap9v6v
does not indicate a virgin-goddess. M. Reinach is, in my opinion,
right in explaining it as " the apartment of the maidens ** where the
maiden priestesses assembled (Bull. Cory. Hell, 1908, p. 499).
PURITY A DIVINE ATTRIBUTE 171
bined the two concepts in one personality we do not
know. When we examine legends and ritual, usually
dateless, of early Hellas, we are aware that a goddess
who was worshipped as a Maid in one locality might
be worshipped as a Mother in another; or the same
goddess at different times of the year might be wor-
shipped now under one aspect, now under another.
Hera of Argos yearly renews her divinity by bathing in
a certain stream. Kore, the young earth-goddess, was
probably an early emanation from Demeter. How
powerful in pre-Hellenic days was the appeal of the
virginal aspect of certain goddesses, is shown by the
antiquity and the tenacity of the dogma concerning
the virginity of Artemis and Athena. Yet the latter
was called M^r^p at Elis 1 . But it would be very rash
to declare that here at last the Virgin-Mother is found
in old Greece. Athena has no offspring ; there is
neither loss nor miraculous preservation of her virginity.
Only the Elean women, wishing themselves to be
mothers, pray to the Virgin-goddess for offspring, and
strengthen their prayer by applying a word to Athena
of such powerful spell-efficacy as " Mother." It would
be a misinterpretation of the method of ancient hieratic
speech to suppose that Athena M^r^p was mystically
imagined as herself both Virgin and Mother. 2
The ritualistic value of purity was probably a postu-
late of the religious feeling of early Hellas, though
Homer gives us only faint glimpses of the idea. <&oifiog
was an old cult-title of Apollo, and its root-
significance may well have been " Pure/' We hear of
Hagne, " the pure goddess/* probably a reverential
1 Cults, vol. i., " Athena/' R. 66.
2 A different view of the whole question might be presented if I
was dealing here with the evidence gleaned from the period just before
Christianity.
172 GREECE AND BABYLON
name for Kore at the Messenian Andania : x and on
the hilltop above the Arcadian Pallantion, Pausanias
records the cult of a nameless group of divinities called
ot xctSapot 6sof* a cult which, according to his account
of it, appears to have descended from very ancient
times. The question of purity in Greek ritual may be
reserved for a later stage in our comparative study.
I will only remark here on the fact that Greek worship,
early and late, was in marked antagonism in this respect
to Greek mythology, the former being on the whole
solemn and beautiful, the latter often singularly im-
pure. In fact, both in the Phrygian and Hellenic
popular imagination we detect an extraordinary vein
of grossness, that seems to mark off these Aryan peoples
sharply from the Mesopotamians, and equally, as far
as we can see, from the other Semites.
3 Cults, iii. p. 206. 2 8, 44, 5.
CHAPTER X.
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER AND THE
ANCIENT COSMOGONIES.
WE may profitably compare the Eastern and Western
peoples according to their respective conceptions of
the divine power. Looking carefully at the Babylonian
hymns and liturgies, we cannot say that the idea of
divine omnipotence was ever an assured dogma, vividly
present to the mind and clearly expressed. Any par-
ticular hymn may so exalt the potency of the particular
deity to whom it is addressed that, in the ecstasy of
prayer and adoration, the worshipper may speak as if
he believed him or her to be powerful over all things
in heaven and earth. But this faith was temporary
and illusive. The power of the deity in the popular
creed, and indeed in the hieratic system, was bound up
with his temple and altar. When Sanherib laid waste
Babylon and the temples, the " gods must flee like
birds up to heaven." In the Babylonian epic the deities
themselves are greatly alarmed by the flood. In one
of the hymns of lamentation, Ishtar laments her own
overthrow in her ruined city, where she " is as a helpless
stranger in her streets." I It is probable that the
popular belief of Babylon agreed in this respect with
that of all other nations of the same type of religion ;
for the popular religious mind is incapable of fully
1 Langdon, op. cit., pp. I, 7.
173
174 GREECE AND BABYLON
realising or logically applying the idea of divine omni-
potence. But this at least is clear in the Babylonian
system, that the higher divinities acting as a group
are stronger than any other alien principle in the
Universe, from the period when Marduk, or originally,
perhaps Ninib, won his victory over Tiamit. 1 The evil
power embodied in the demons remains indeed active
and strong, and much of the divine agency is devoted
to combating them. And the demons are impressive
beings, impersonating often the immoral principle, but
they do not assume the grandeur of an Ahriman, or
rise to his position as compeers of the high god. Thus
the Babylonian theology escapes the duality of the
Zarathustrian ; the god can always exorcise and over-
power the demon if the demon-ridden man repents
and returns to communion with his deity by penance
and confession.
Furthermore, the ancient documents reveal the
Babylonian deities as the arbiters of destiny. Marduk
is named by King Neriglassar " the Leader of
Destiny " ; 2 and we have frequent allusions to the
gods fixing the yearly fates at an annual meeting.
Nebo the scribe is the writer and the keeper of the
" Doomsbook " of Heaven, and this book is called
"the tablets that cannot be altered, that determine
the bounds (or cycle) of Heaven and Earth." 3 Fate
is neither personified nor magnified into a transcendent
cosmic force overpowering and shaping the will of the
gods.
How the other religions of polytheistic Asia Minor
dealt with these matters is not revealed ; and the
1 Vide Langdon, op. cit., p. 225.
2 Vide Roscher, Lexikon, ii p. 2348.
a Vide Zimmern, K.A.T*, p. 401.
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 175
comparison here, as in many other points, must be
immediate between Mesopotamia and Hellas. Much
that has just been said of the former may be affirmed
of the latter in this respect. In Homer the pre-eminence,
even the omnipotence, of Zeus is occasionally expressed
as a dogma, .and we must believe that this deity had
risen to this commanding position before the Homeric
period, at least among the progressive tribes ; 1 and
throughout the systematised theology of Greece his
sovereignty was maintained more consistently than,
owing to the shifting of the powers of the cities, was
that of Marduk or Bel or Enlil in the Surnerian-Baby-
lonian system. Probably the high idea of divine omni-
potence was as vaguely and feebly realised by the
average primitive Hellene as we have reason to suspect
that it was by the average Babylonian. Also, as Hellas
was far less centralised than Babylonia, the efficacy of
the local or village god or goddess or daimon might often
transcend the influence of Zeus. But at least we have
no Hellenic evidence of so narrow a theory, as that
the deity's power depended upon his temple or his
image, or even upon his sacrifice.
It has often been popularly and lightly maintained
that the Hellenic deities were subordinate to a power
called Fate. This is a shallow misjudgment, based on
a misinterpretation of a few phrases in Homer ; we may
be certain that the aboriginal Hellene was incapable of so
gloomy an abstraction, which would sap the vitality of
personal polytheism, and which only appears in strength
in the latter periods of religious decay. Were it, indeed,
a root-principle of Hellenic religion, it would strongly
differentiate it from the Mesopotamian.
1 Even the Pythian Apollo, in our earliest record of his oracle, is
only the voice of " the counsels of God " (cf . Horn. Od., 8, 79).
176 GREECE AND BABYLON
In thus comparing the two religions according to their
respective conceptions of divine power, we note two strik-
ing phenomena in the Eastern world. The Mesopo-
tamian gods are magicians, and part of their work is
worked by magic. Marduk and Ea, the wise deity of
Eridu, serve as exercisers of demons in behalf of the
other gods. 1 In a panegyric on the former, the strange
phrase occurs, " the spittle of life is thine/' 2 which
probably alludes to the well-known magical qualities
of the saliva. Eridu, the home of Ea, was also the
original home of Chaldean magic. When in the early
cosmic struggle between the powers of light and dark-
ness, Tiamat, the mother and queen of the latter, selects
her champion Qingou as leader, she proclaims, " I have
pronounced thy magic formula, in the assembly of the
gods I have made thee great/' 3 In magic, great is the
power of the spoken word, the \6yog ; and the Word,
of which the efficacious force arose in the domain of
magic, has been exalted, as we are well aware, by higher
religion to a great cosmic divine agency, sometimes
personified. It was so exalted in early Babylonian
religion. The deity acts and controls the order of the
world by the divine Word. Many of the Sumerian
hymns lay stress on its quasi-personal virtue or " mana " ;
and often on its terrible and destructive operation ; and
in one, as we have seen, the goddess Nana is identified
with the Word of Enlil. 4 In a great hymn to Sin, 5 the
might of his Word is glorified in verses that recall the
Psalmist's phrase : " The voice of the Lord is mighty
1 Weber, Ddmonenbeschworung bei den Babyloniern und Assyrern,
P-7-
2 Roscher, Lexihon, ii. p. 2355, quoting Hymn iv. R. 29, i.
8 Dhorme, Choix, etc., p. 25, 1. 39.
4 E.g. Langdon, op. cit. 9 pp. 39-41 ; cf. p. xix.
5 Zimmern, Babyl. Hymne u. Gebete, p. 8.
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 177
in operation." The Word of Bel-Marduk is said to be
stronger than any exorciser or diviner, and is the theme
of a special hymn. 1 It is described in another as " a net
of majesty that encompasseth heaven and earth." The
Word of Marduk shakes the sea, 2 as the Hebrew poet
declares that ee the voice of the Lord shaketh the cedar-
trees/' " The spirit of the Word is Enlil ... the Word
which stilleth the heavens above ... a prophet it
hath not, a magician it hath not/' 3 that is, no prophet
can fully interpret, no magician can control, the Word.
A most potent word is the name of the divinity, and
the partial apotheosis of the name itself is a strange
religious phenomenon, which also originated in the
domain of magic, and has played a momentous part in
the Egyptian, Judaic, Christian, and other high religions. 4
It appears also in Mesopotamian religion. In a hymn
to Enlil we find the phrase : "at thy name, which
created the world, the heavens were hushed of them-
selves/' 5 In the Babylonian poem of creation the
primal state of Chaos is thus described, " no god had yet
been created, no name had yet been named, no destiny
fixed/' 6 The gods name the fifty names of Ninib, and
the name of fifty becomes sacred to him, so that even in
the time of Gudea a temple was actually dedicated to
Number Fifty. 7
Now, in the respects just considered, the earliest
aspect of Greek religion that is revealed to us presents
a striking contrast. The relations between magic and
1 Dhorme, Choix, etc., p. 343.
- Reseller, Lexikon, ii p. 2367 (iv. R. 26, n. 4) .
3 Langdon, op. cit., pp. 39, 99-
4 Vide my essays in Evolution of Religion, pp. 184-192,
5 Langdon, op. cit., p. 129.
6 Dhorme, op. cit^ p. 5, 1. 7.
7 Jeremias, Holle und Paradies, p. 12 ; Roscher, Lexikon, s.v.
" Ninib/' iii. p. 368.
12
178 GREECE AND BABYLON
religion are markedly different. 1 Magic had doubt-
less the same hold on early Greece as it has on most
societies at a certain stage of culture. We can conclude
this from the glimpses of it revealed by Homer and some
ancient myths, such as the story of Salmoneus, as well
as by the evidence of its practice in later Greece, and
as such phenomena are not of sudden growth we can
safely believe that they were part of an ancient tradition
always alive among the people. But while Babylonian
magic proclaims itself loudly in the great religious liter-
ature and highest temple ritual, Greek magic is barely
mentioned in the older literature of Greece, plays no
part at all in the hymns, and can only with difficulty
be discovered as latent in the higher ritual. Again, Baby-
lonian magic is essentially demoniac ; but we have no
evidence suggesting that the pre-Homeric Greek was
demon-ridden, or that demonology and exorcism were
leading factors of his consciousness and practice : the
earliest mythology does not suggest that he habitually
imputed his physical or moral disorders to demons, nor
does it convey any hint of the existence in the early
society of that terrible functionary, the witch-finder, or
of the institution of witch-trials.
Had Greek religion and mythology been deeply im-
pregnated with Babylonian influences we should find
it difficult to account for this momentous difference.
The same reflection is forced upon us when we observe
that the Aoyog or Divine Word conceived as a cosmic
power plays no part in the earliest Hellenic theology
of which we have any cognisance (we are not here con-
cerned with the later history of the concept) : nor can
we find in the earliest Greek period the name of God
exalted into the position of a divine creative force ;
1 Vide infra, pp. 291-293.
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 179
although, as I have shown elsewhere, the earliest Hellene,
as the later, was fully sensitive to the magico-divine
efficacy of names. 1
We may also gather something for our present pur-
pose from a comparison between the cosmogony or cosmic
myths of East and West. Of these it is only the Baby-
lonian and Hebraic that can claim a great antiquity
of record. What is reported of Phoenician belief concern-
ing these matters is of late authority, Eusebios quoting
from Sanchuniathon or Philo Byblios, and this is too
much permeated with later elements to be useful here.
As regards the Hellenic theory of the origin of the world
and of man, putting aside a few scattered hints in the
Homeric poems, we have Hesiod for our first and in-
sufficient witness. If we can detect Babylonian in-
fluence in the Hesiodic system, we must not hastily
conclude that this was already rife in the second mil-
lennium : on the other hand, if Hesiod seems to have
escaped it, it is far less likely that it was strong upon
the proto-HeUenes.
For early Babylonian cosmogony our main evidence
is the epic poem of creation, preserved on tablets found
in the library of King Assurbanipal, which elucidates,
and in the main corroborates, the fragments of the story
given by Berosos in the third century B.C. Our earliest
record, then, is actually of the seventh century, but
Assyriologists have given reasons for the view that the
epic copied for Assurbanipal descends from a period as
early as B.C. 2000 ; for part of it accords with an old
Babylonian hymn that has been discovered. 2 The
document is therefore ancient enough for the purposes
of our comparison. It is well known through various
1 Evolution of Religion, pp. 186, 187.
2 Zimmern, K.A.T*, pp. 490, 491, 497.
i8o GREECE AND BABYLON
publications, and can be read conveniently in the de-
tailed exposition of King in his handbook on Babylonian
religion. 1
When we consider carefully the more significant
features in this cosmogony, we are struck with its almost
total unlikeness to anything that we can discover or
surmise in early Hellenic thought. It is true that the
Babylonian theory starts with the dogma that the earliest
cosmic fact was the element of water. Apsu and Tiamat
are the first powers in an unordered universe, and these
seem to be the personal forms of the upper and lower
waters, the fresh and the salt. We find the parallel
thought in Homer, who speaks of Okeanos as " the
source of all things/ 1 2 including even the gods. But the
value of such a parallelism is of the slightest, for the vague
theory of a watery origin of created things appears widely
diffused in the myths of remote peoples, for instance,
North-American Indians, Aztecs, the Vedic Aryans, and
there is a glimmer of it in the old Norse. 3 No conclusion,
then, can be drawn from so slight a coincidence. If we
know anything of the cosmogony of the pre-Homeric
society we know it from Hesiod, for Homer himself
shows no interest and makes no revelation on the
subject. With certain reservations and after careful
criticism we may be able to regard some parts of the
Hesiodic statement as reflecting the thought of an age
anterior to Homer's. Therefore it is of some present
value to observe how little of characteristically Baby-
lonian speculation appears in the Hesiodic Theogony or
1 Pp. 52-100 ; cf. Pinches, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p, 30,
etc. ; Zimmern, op. cit., 488-506.
2 /., 14, 246, 302.
3 E.g., vide- A. Lang, Myth Ritual and Religion, pp. 182, 198, 203 ;
cf. Macdonell, Vedic Mythology, pp. 13, 14 ; Goltaer, Handbuch der
German. Mythologie, pp. 512-514.
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 181
Works and Days. Both systems agree with each other,
and it may be said with all theogonies and religious
cosmogonies, in regarding the primeval creative forces as
personal powers who work either by the method of sexual
generation or through mechanical processes of creation :
the first of these methods, which though mythical in
form has more affinity with organic science, is pre-
dominant over the other in the Hesiodic narra-
tive. But the personal powers are different in the
two systems. In the Babylonian the greatest of the
primeval dynasts is TiSmat, the sea, the mother of the
gods and also of all monsters : in the Hesiodic it is Gaia,
the Earth-mother, who does not appear at all in the
Eastern cosmogony, but who claimed this position in the
Hellenic through her deep-seated influence in the ancient
religion. We note also that the Babylonian Sea is
decidedly evil, the aboriginal foe of the gods of light, a
conception alien to ordinary Hellenic thought. Again,
the Babylonian creation of an ordered cosmos is a result
of the great struggle between Marduk and Tiarnat, the
power of light and the sovereign of chaos : it is pre-
ceded by hate and terror. In the Hellenic account the
generation of the heavens, the mountains, the sea, and the
early dynasty of Titan-powers is peaceful and is stimu-
lated by the power of love, Eros, who has his obvious
double in the Kama or principle of desire in a cosmo-
gonic hymn of the Rig- Veda, but is not mentioned by
the Babylonian poet. (Nor does it concern us for the
moment that this Eros is in respect of mere literary
tradition post-Homeric : we may surmise at least that
he was a pre-Homeric power in Boeotia.) Again, when
we come to the theomachy in Hesiod, as an event it has
no cosmogonic value at all : it has the air merely of a
dynastic struggle between elder and younger divinities,
i8s GREECE AND BABYLON
and the myth may really have arisen in part from the
religious history of a shifting of cults corresponding to: a
shifting of population : nor are the Titans more repre-
sentative of evil or of a lower order of things than the
Olympian deities ; and cosmic creation, so far as Hesiod
treats of it at all, seems over before the struggle begins.
On the other hand, after Marduk has destroyed Tiamat
he constructs his cosmos out of her limbs, and then
proceeds to assign their various stations to the great
gods, his compeers. Thus the struggle of the god with
the principle of disorder has a cosmic significance which
is not expressed in the Titanomachy. The curious
conception also that the universe was compacted out of
the dismembered limbs of a divine personage, which
reminds us of the Vedic story of the giant Purusa 1 and of
the Norse legend of Ymir, is not clearly discoverable in
Hellenic mythology : for the Hesiodic myth of the forms
and growths that spring from the blood of the mutilated
Ouranos is no real parallel. And there is another trait
in the Babylonian theory of a world-conflict that dis-
tinguishes it from the Hellenic myths of a Titanomachy
or Gigantomachy ; it was sometimes regarded not as a
single event, finished with once for all, but as a struggle
liable to be repeated at certain periods, 2 On the other
hand, Hesiod's narrative of the oppression of Gala's
children by Ouranos and the outrage inflicted on him by
Kronos has its parallels in Maori and savage legend, 3
but none in Mesopotamian, so far as our knowledge goes
at present.
A different Babylonian mythological text from the
library of Assurbanipal speaks of another battle waged
1 Macdonell, op. cti., pp. 12, 13.
2 Zimmern, JK.A.T.*, p. 497.
3 Vide A. Lang, Myth Ritual and Religion, ii. pp. 29, 30.
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 183
by Marduk against Labbu, a male monster imagined
mainly as a huge snake ; and Marduk is described as
descending to the conflict in clouds and lightning : a the
legend has no obvious significance for cosmogony, for
it places the event after the creation of the world and of
men and cities. But it has this interest for us, that it may
be the prototype for the legend of Zeus' struggle with
Typhoeus, which is known to Homer, and which he places
in the country of the Arimoi, regarded by many of the
ancient interpreters, including Pindar, as Cilicia. 2 Now,
the story of this conflict in Hesiod's theogony has no
connections with the Titanomachy or the Giganto-
machy, nor is it there linked by any device to any known
Hellenic myth ; nor is it derived, like the legend of
Apollo and Python, from genuine Hellenic cult-history.
It has an alien air and character. Typhoeus is on the
whole regarded as a monstrous dragon, but one of his
voices is that of a lion, another that of a bull. The
resemblance of this narrative to the Babylonian one just
mentioned is striking, and becomes all the more salient
when we compare certain Babylonian cylinders which
picture Marduk in combat with a monster, sometimes of
serpent form, sometimes with the body of a lion or a bull. 3
The Typhoeus-legend belongs also essentially to the Asia-
Minor shores, and if Cilicia was really the country whence
it came to the knowledge of the Homeric Greeks, it is a
significant fact that it was just this corner of the Asia-
Minor coast that felt the arms of the earliest Assyrian
conquerors in the fourteenth century B.C. ; and it is just
such myths that travel fast and far.
1 Zimmern, K.A.T. 3 , p. 498 ; cf. King, op. cit., pp. 84-86.
2 Vide Strab., p. 626 ; others placed it in the volcanic region of
Lydia (ib, t p. 579).
Cf. King, op. cit., pp. 101, 102 (plate); and Zimmern, K.A.T*,
pp. 502 503, n. 2.
184 GREECE AND BABYLON
If the hypothesis of Assyrian origin is reasonable
here, many will regard it as still more reasonable in
regard to the Deukalion flood-story. Certain details
in it remind us, no doubt, of the Babylonian flood-
myth ; and as this latter was far diffused through Asia
Minor, it was quite easy for it to wander across the
Aegean and touch Hellas. But if it did, we have no
indication that it reached the Hellenes in the early
period with which we are here concerned, as Hesiod
is our earliest authority for it.
The last theme of high interest in the cosmogonic
theory of ancient Babylonia is the creation of man.
According to Berosos, this momentous act was attri-
buted to Bel, who, after the victory over Chaos, com-
manded one of the gods to cut off his head and to make
men and animals out of earth mixed with his own blood,
and this story is partly corroborated by an old cuneiform
text that is derived from the beginning of the second
millennium. 1 This interesting theory was not universally
accepted, for another and independent text ascribes the
creation of man to Marduk and a goddess called Aruru,
simply as a mechanical act of power. 2 The idea im-
plicit in the former account, of the blood-relationship
of man to god, is of the greater potentiality for religious
metaphysic, and a similar notion is found, developed
into a high spiritual doctrine, in the later Orphic Zagreus-
mystery. But there is no trace of it in genuine Hellenic
thought or literature. We have no provedly early
Greek version of the origin of man : only, in the Works
and Days, we are told that the Immortals or Zeus made
the men of the five ages, the third generation, out of
ash-trees : it may be that the story of Prometheus
1 Zimmern, K.A.T*, p. 497.
2 King, op. cit., pp. 88-91 ; Zimmern, op. cit., p. 498 (b).
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 185
forming them out of clay was known to Hesiod, as
Lactantius Placidus attests ; l in any case we may
judge it to be of great antiquity on account of its wide
vogue in the later period, and its occurrence in other
primitive folklore. But nothing like it has as yet been
found in the lepog Xo<yo$ of Mesopotamia.
Generally we may say that the Hesiodic cosmogony
bears no significant resemblance to the Babylonian,
and this negative fact makes against the theory of
Mesopotamian influence upon pre-Homeric Hellas.
As a divine cosmogony implies some organic theory
of the Universe, so the polytheisms that attempted such
speculations would be confronted also with the problem
of finding some principle of order by which they might
regulate the relations of the various divinities, one to
the other. We find such attempts in Mesopotamian
religion. Certain deities are affiliated to others, Marduk
to Ea, Nebo to Marduk, though such divine relationships
are less clear and less insisted on than in Hellenic theo-
logy ; and the grouping of divinities shifts according
to the political vicissitudes of the peoples and cities.
We may discern a tendency at times to use the triad
as a unifying principle, giving us such trinities as Ami,
Bel, Ea, or Sin, Shamash, Adad ; 2 we have glimpses
of a trinitarian cult in early Carthage, 3 and slight
indications of it in the Minoan-Mycenaean pillar-ritual. 4
But I cannot find anything to suggest that among
the cultured or uncultured Semites it was ever in the
ancient period a powerful and constructive idea, able
1 Ad Ov. Metam., I, 34 (the authenticity of the Lactantius passage
is doubted ; vide Bapp in Roscher's Lexikon, iii. p. 3044) .
2 The first is specially Babylonian, the second in Esarhaddon's
inscriptions (vide Jastrow, op. cit., pp. 248, 249).
3 "La Trinit6 Carthaginoise " in Gazette ArcheoL, 1879-1880.
4 E\ans, in Hell. Jouvn., 1901, p. 140.
i86 GREECE AND BABYLON
to beget a living dogma that might capture the popular
mind and spread and germinate in adjacent lands. 1
We have perhaps as much right to regard the number
seven as a grouping principle of Babylonian polytheism,
in the later period at least, when we find a group of
seven high deities corresponding to the seven planets. 2
We might discover a Hittite trinity of Father, Mother,
and Son if we concentrated our attention on the Boghaz-
Keui reliefs; but the other Hittite evidence, both
literary and monumental, gives no hint of this as a
working idea in the religion. In fact, in most poly-
theisms of the Mediterranean type it is easy to discover
trinities and easy to deceive oneself about them.
The human family reflected into the heavens
naturally suggests the divine trio of Father, Mother,
Child. And this may be found on the Asia-Minor shore
and in Hellas. It would be more important if we could
discover the worship of this triad in an indissoluble
union from which the mystic idea of a triune godhead
might arise. This is not discernible clearly in the older
period on either side of the Aegean. The cult-complex
of Zeus, Semele, and Dionysos does not belong to ancient
Hellas and is rare at any period ; that of Hades Demeter
Kore is occasionally found in cults of doubtful antiquity,
but usually the mother and daughter were worshipped
without the male deity. The Homeric triad so often
invoked in adjurations of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo,
which misled Mr. Gladstone, is due probably to the
exigencies of hexameter verse, and is not guaranteed
by genuine cult. No divine triad in Hellas can be
proved to have descended from the earliest period of
1 Vide, however, Zimmern, K.A.T*, p. 419, who tries to derive the
Christian Trinity ultimately from Babylon.
2 Vide Roscher, Lexikon, iii. p. 67, s.v. "Nebo."
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 187
Greek religion, except probably that of the Charites at
Orchomenos. 1 We have later evidence of a trinity
of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, expressing the triad
that Nature presents to us of sky, sea, and earth.
But probably one of these figures is an emanation of
Zeus himself ; the sky-god having become " chthonian "
in a very early period. 2 We cannot say, then, that the
earliest period of Hellenic religion shows a trinitarian
tendency ; and if it were so, we could not impute it to
early Mesopotamian influence, for the idea of a trinity
does not appear in the Eastern religion with such force
and strength as to be likely to travel far.
As for the artificial group of the twelve Olympians,
we should certainly have been tempted to connect this
with Babylonian lore, the number twelve being of
importance in astronomical numeration ; only that
the divine group of twelve does not happen to occur
in Babylonian religious records at all. Nor does the
complex cult of the A#5g;ea foot appear to belong to
the earliest period of Greek religion. 3 And so far
I have been able to discern nothing that justifies the
suggestion 4 that the principle of unification or divine
grouping in early Mediterranean polytheism came
from Babylon.
A severely organised polytheism with one chief
divinity, to whom all the others were in definite degrees
subordinated, might evolve a monotheism. And in
Babylonian literature we can mark certain tendencies
making in this direction. One tablet contains an
inscription proclaiming all the high gods to be forms
of Marduk, Nergal the Marduk of war, Nebo the Marduk
1 Vide Cults, v. p. 431.
2 Vide op. cit., vol. iii. pp. 284-285.
3 Vide op. cit. t vol. i. pp. 84, 85.
4 Made by Weber in Arabien vor dem Islam, p. 19.
i88 GREECE AND BABYLON
of land, 1 That all the deities were mere forms or
emanations of the Eternal might have been an esoteric
doctrine of certain gifted minds,though itwas difficult thus
to explain away and to de-individualise the powerful self-
asserting personality of Ishtar, for an attractive goddess-
cult is always a strong obstacle to pure monotheism. A
particular king might wish at times to exalt the cult of
a particular god into a monotheistic ideal ; the attempt
was seriously made in Egypt and failed. It may have
been seriously intended by King Rammannirari m.
(B.C. 811-782), who introduced the cult of Nebo, always
one of the most spiritual figures of the Pantheon, into
Kelach ; 'hence comes a long inscription on two statues
now in the British Museum, set up by a governor in
honour of the king, which is valuable for its ethical
import, and still more interesting for its monotheistic
exhortation at the close : 2 "Oh man, yet to be born,
believe in Nebo, and trust in no other gods but him."
Here is the seed that might have been developed by
a powerful prophet into pure monotheism. But the
ecstatic Babylonian votary is always falling into con-
tradiction, for in the earlier part of this hymn he has
called Nebo, " The beloved of Bel, the Lord of Lords/'
What, then, must the congregation think of Bel ?
In Greek religion the germs of monotheistic thought
were still weaker and still less likely to fructify. The
earliest Hellenic tribes had already certain deities in
common, and the leading stocks at least must have
regarded Zeus as the supreme god. They must have
also adopted many indigenous deities that they found
powerful in their new homes, whose cult could not be
1 Vide Pinches, op. cit., p. 118 ; Jastrow, op. cit., p. 203, n. i.
2 Quoted by Jeremias in his article on " Nebo " in Roscher, Lexikon,
iii p. 49.
THE CONCEPT OF DIVINE POWER 189
uprooted even if they wished to do so. We must there-
fore imagine the pre-Homeric societies as maintaining
a complex polytheism, with some principle of divine
hierarchy struggling to assert itself. Homer, if it is
ever true to speak of him as preaching, seems certainly
the preacher of the supremacy of Zeus. How far this
idea was accepted in the various localities of cult we
have not sufficient material for deciding : much would
depend on the degree to which the individuals were
penetrated by the higher literature, which from Homer
onwards proclaimed the same religious tenet. 1 We can
at the same time be sure that in many localities the
countryfolk would be more under the spell of some
ancient deity of the place than of the sky-father of the
Aryan Hellenes. And though his cult was high placed
by the progressive races, and his personality powerfully
pervading in the realm of nature and human society,
so that the higher thinkers entered on a track of specu-
lation that leads to monotheism, the masses did not
and could not follow them, having, in fact, the contrary
bias. The popular polytheism showed itself most
tenacious of divine personalities ; and owing partly to
the sacred power of divine names, the various titles of a
single divinity tend occasionally to engender distinct
divine entities. I have also already indicated that art
contributed to the same effect through multiplying
idols. So far, then, from displaying monotheistic potenti-
alities, Greek polytheism, from the pre-Homeric period
we may suspect, and certainly after the Homeric age,
tended to become more polytheistic.
1 It is interesting to note the cult of the supreme god under the
title of M^y wros in the remote district and city of Boulis, which excited
the attention of Pausanias. Yet the men of Boulis were no monotheists,
for they had temples of Artemis and Dionysos (Paus., 10, 37, 3 ; cf. my
article in Anthropological Essays presented to E.B. Tylor, I97 P- 92).
CHAPTER XL
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT OF THE
EASTERN AND WESTERN PEOPLES.
A MORE interesting and fruitful ground of comparison
is that which looks at the inward sentiment or psychic
emotion of the different religions, at the personal
emotional relation of the individual towards the god-
head. As I observed before, a clear judgment on this
question is only possible when the religious memorials
of a people are numerous, varied, and personal, so
that some of them at least may be regarded as the ex-
pression of the individual spirit. Even if the priest or
the ritual dictates the expression, the pious and frequent
votary may come to feel genuinely what is dictated to
him. Hence we can gather direct testimony concerning
the ancient Babylonian as we can of the ancient Hebrew
religious temper and emotion ; for though most of the
Mesopotamian documents are concerned with the royal
ceremonial, which does not usually reveal genuine
personal feeling, yet in this case the royal inscriptions,
whether religious narrative or liturgies or prayers, are
unusually convincing as revelations of self. And be-
sides these, we have many private hymns of penance
and formulae of exorcism.
On the other hand, the ancient Western world and
even historic Greece is singularly barren of this kind
of religious testimony. We know much about the
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT 191
State religion, but we have very few ritual formulae or
public or private prayers. Our evidence is mainly the
religious utterances of the higher poetry and literature
and a few lyric hymns composed not for the solitary
worshipper, but for common and tribal ritual-service.
But we have also the mythology and the art and the
general manifestations of the Hellenic spirit in other
directions that enable us to conclude something concern-
ing the religious psychology of the average man in the
historic periods, and if we find this markedly different
from that of the oriental, we shall find it hard to believe
that the Babylonian spirit could have worked with any
strong influence on the proto-Hellene.
A sympathetic study of the Babylonian-Assyrian
documents impresses us with certain salient traits of
the Mesopotamian religious spirit, some of which are
common to other members of the great Semitic race.
In a certain sense the Babylonian might be described
as " ein Gott-betrunkener Mensch " : as one possessed
with the deepest consciousness of the ineffable greatness
of God, of his own utter dependence, and at the same
time of the close personal association between himself
and the divinity. The ecstatic adoration we have
marked in the liturgies is the result of a purely mental
contemplation, will-power, and conviction, not of mystic
initiation for Babylonia had no mysteries nor of
orgiastic rites that could afford a physico-psychic
stimulus. The individual seems to have regarded
himself at times as the son, more often as the bond-
slave, of his own tutelary divinity, who is angry when
he sins and becomes favourable and a mediator in
his behalf with other gods when he repents. In private
letters of the time of Hammurabi we find the greeting,
" May thy protecting god keep thy head well." A
192 GREECE AND BABYLON
common formula occurs in the incantations : "I, whose
god is so-and-so, whose goddess is so-and-so." 1 In
the penance-liturgy the priest speaks thus of the
suppliant sinner, " Thy slave who bears the weight of
thy wrath is covered with dust, . . . commend him
to the god who created him/' 2 With this we may
compare certain phrases in a well-known penitential
psalm, " Oh mighty Lady of the world, Queen of man-
kind, . . . His god and goddess in sorrow with him,
cry out unto thee. ... As a dove that moans I abound
in sighings/' 3 Abject remorse, tears and sighing,
casting-down of the countenance, are part of the ritual
that turns away the anger of the deity : hence fear
of God and humility are recognised religious virtues.
Merodach-Baladin of Babylon, in Sargon's inscription, is
described as a fool " who did not fear the name of the
Lord of Lords," 4 , and the idea is shaped in a general
ethical maxim in another inscription, " He who does not
fear his god is cut down like a reed/' 5 "1 love the
fear of God/' says Nebukadnezar in the record of his
life. 6
Such emotion and mental attitude is consonant
with the Hebraic and with much of the modern religious
temper ; but entirely out of harmony with all that
we know of the Hellenic. The religious habit of the
Hellene strikes us by comparison as sober, well-tempered,
often genial, never ecstatically abject, but even we
may say self-respecting. Tears for sin, lamentations
1 Vide Langdon, Transactions of Congress of ReL, 1908, i. p. 254.
3 Zimmern, Babylon. Hymn. u. Gebete> p. 27.
3 Langdon, Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, p. 269.
4 Keilinschr. Bibl. (Schrader), vol. it pt. ii. p. 69.
5 iv. R. 3, 5 ; quoted by Jeremias in Bab. Assyr. Votstell. vom
Leben nach dem Tode.
9 Keilinschr. Bibl., iii. 2, p. n.
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT 193
and sighs, the countenance bowed to the ground, the
body cleaving to the pavement, these are not part of
his ritual ; the wrath of God was felt as a communal
more often than as an individual misfortune, and in
any case was averted, not by emotional outpourings
of the individual heart, but by ritual acts, solemn
choruses, soothing sacrifice and songs, or by special
piacular lustrations that wiped off the taint of sin.
Tears are never mentioned, 1 except indirectly in the
fictitious lamentations for some buried hero, annually
and ceremoniously lamented, such as Achilles. Nor
can we find in earlier Hellenic ethic the clear recogni-
tion of fear and humility among the religious virtues, 2
while both are paraded in the inscriptions of the later
Babylonian kings, even in those that reveal a monstrous
excess of pride. 3 The Hellenic god might punish
the haughty and high-minded, he did not love the
grovelling, but rather the man of moderate life, tone,
and act. Such is God for the civic religion of the free
man ; while the Babylonian liturgy reflects the despotic
society. The Hellene, for instance, does not try to
win for himself the favour of the divinity by calling
himself his slave. And the common phrase found on
the Greek Christian tombs, S Sovhog rov Qeov, has
passed into Christianity from Semitic sources. 4 This
single fact illustrates, perhaps better than any other,
1 In Aesch. Agam., 1. 70, the words o$re 8aKpti<av are spurious,
as I have argued in Class. Review, 1897, p. 293.
2 We might perhaps infer their recognition from the occasional
use of the word deLffLSalfiw in a partly good sense, e.g. Aristot.
Pol., 5, n, 25; Xen. Ages., 11, 8; but its bad sense is more
emphasised by Theophrastos in his " Characters."
3 Nebukadnezar (of all people) calls himself more than once " the
humble, the submissive," e.g. Keilinschr . BibL, iii. p. 63.
4 We find the phrase dov\o$ it/ttrepos also in the Greek magic
papyri, but these are charged with the Oriental spirit ; Kenyon, Greek
Pap., i. p. 1 08, 11. 745-6.
i 9 4 GREECE AND BABYLON
the different temper of the old Oriental and old European
religions ; and there is a curious example of it in the
bilingual Graeco-Phoenician inscription found in Malta,
commemorating a dedication to Melkarth or to Herakles
' Ap^yer^ : the Phoenicians recommend themselves
to the god as "thy slaves/' the Greeks use neither
this nor any other title of subservient flattery. In
this connection it is well to note the significance of
marking the body of the worshipper by branding,
cutting, or tattooing with some sign that consecrated
him as slave or familiar follower to the divinity. The
practice, which may have been of great antiquity,
though the evidence is not earlier than the sixth century
B.C., was in vogue in Syria, Phrygia, and in early Israel,
and was adopted by some Christian enthusiasts, but no
proof of it has yet been adduced from Mesopotamia.
It was essentially un-Hellenic ; but was apparently
followed by some of the Dionysiac thiasoi as a Thracian
tradition. 2
In fact, it is only in the latest periods that we find
in Hellas an individual personal religion approaching
the Babylonian in intensity. The older cult was com-
munal and tribal rather than personal; even the
household gods, such as Zeus Krfotos and 'Epz&los, the
gods of the closet and storehouse, the hearth-goddess,
were shared by the householder in common with the
nearest circle of kindred. These cults were partly
utilitarian, and the moral emotion that they quickened
was the emotion of kinship : they do not appear to
have inspired a high personal and emotional faith and
trust. Nor usually had the average Hellene of the
1 C. I. Sem. t i. No. 122.
2 These facts are collected and exposed in a valuable article by
Perdrizet in Archiv. fur Relig. Wissensch., 1911, pp. 54-129 ; cf. Revue
des tudes anciennes, 1910, pp. 236-237 ; Hell Journ., 1888, pi. vi.
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT 195
earlier period the conception of a personal tutelary
divinity who brought him to life, and watched over his
course, preserving, rebuking, and interceding for him.
The Babylonian fancy of the great king sitting in infancy
on the lap of the goddess and drinking milk from her
breasts would not commend itself to the religious sense
in Greece.
In Mesopotamia and in the other Semitic communities
the fashion of naming a child after the high god or
goddess was very common commoner I am inclined
to think than in Hellas, though in the latter country
such names as Demetrios, Apollo dor os, Zenon, Diogenes,
point to the same religious impulse ; but they appear
to have arisen only in the later period. The Hellenic
language did not admit, and Hellenic thought would
not have approved of, those mystic divine names, which
express as in a sacred text some quality or action of
the divinity, such as we find in the Bible ("the Lord will
provide "), and in pre-Islamitic inscriptions of Arabia,
Ili-kariba, "My God hath blessed"; Ili-azza, "My
God is mighty " ; Hi-padaja, " My God hath redeemed/' 1
Such names served as spells for the protection of the
child, and are speaking illustrations of the close per-
sonal dependence of the individual upon the god.
This is also illustrated by another fashion, possibly
ancient, of Semitic religious nomenclature : not only
was the individual frequently named after the deity,
but the deity might sometimes receive as a cult-title
the name of the individual. Of this practice among
the polytheistic Semites the only examples of which
I am aware come from a late period and from the region
of Palmyra : Greek inscriptions of the late Imperial
era give such curious forms as &sog 'Avpov, &sog
1 Vide O. Weber, Arabien vor dem Islam, p. 21,
196 GREECE AND BABYLON
0soY 'Apzpov : I and these descriptive
names in the genitive must designate the principal
worshipper or founder of the cult ; they are mostly
un-Greek, as the religious custom certainly is, which
is illustrated by such ancient Biblical expressions as
"the God of Abraham," "the God of Jacob/' We
may find an example of the same point of view in the
Phrygian title of MW Qupvcutov in Pontus, if we take
the most probable explanation, namely, that it is
derived from the Persian Pharnakes, the founder of
the cult ; 2 and again in a Carian dedication to Zeus
Panamaros 'Apyvpov, as "Apyvpog is found in the same
neighbourhood as the name of a living man. 3
The only parallel that Hellenic religion offers is the
doubtful one, Athena A/am, whose temple is recorded
at Megara : 4 it may be that the goddess took her
title from the hero because his grave was once associated
with the temple. In any case, it is not so striking that
the mythic hero should stand in this intimate relation
with the deity as that the living individual should.
The ecstatic and self - prostrating adoration of
divinity which is characteristic of the Babylonian
temper might manifest itself at times in that excess
of sentiment that we call sentimentality : we catch
this tone now and again in the childlike entreaties with
which the supplicator appeals to the deity as his father
or mother; in the poetic pathos of the hymns to Tarn-
muz, which sometimes remind us of the sentimentality
1 Dittenberg, Orient. Graec. Inscr., 619 (=Lebas-Waddington,
Inscr., iii. 2393) ; the reading here is Qebv Atf/^, probably a mistake for
Afytov; cf. Lebas-Wadd., 2395 and 2455.
2 Vide Roschei's Lexikon, ii. p. 2752.
3 Vide ib., iii p. 1496.
4 Cults, vol. L, "Athena," R. g6b (Pans., i, 42, 4) ; as regards "Apollo
Sarpedonios >J we are uncertain whether the title was not merely
local-geographical.
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT 197
of some of our modern hymns : he is called " Lord of
the tender voice and shining eyes " ; " he of the dove-
like voice/* 1 Such language may be called " hypo-
koristic," to use a Greek phrase ; it belongs to the
feminine sentiment in religion, and we are familiar
with it in our own service. No echo of it is heard
in the older Greek religious literature nor in any record
of Greek liturgy. We can, indeed, scarcely pronounce
on the question as to the tone to which primitive Greek
wailing-services were attuned. We have only a few
hints of some simple ancient ritual of sorrow : the
pre-Homeric Greek may have bewailed Linos and
Hyakinthos, as we hear that the Elean women in a
later period bewailed Achilles ; but if, indeed, the frag-
ment of a Linos-threnody that the Scholiast on Homer
has preserved for us is really primitive, 2 it has some
pathos, but much brightness and nothing of the Baby-
lonian sentimentality. The spirit of the Greek religious
lyric strikes us as always virile, and as likely to be
unsympathetic with the violent and romantic expression
of sorrow or with endearing ecstasy of appeal.
The other trait that should be considered here in
the religious spirit of the Mesopotamian Semites is
fanaticism, an emotional quality which often affords
a useful basis of comparison between various religions.
This religious phenomenon is best known by its deadly
results ; but in itself it is most difficult to define, as
are other special moral terms that imply blame and are
highly controversial. It is only found among those
who feel their religion so deeply as to be relatively in-
different to other functions of life. We impute fanati-
1 Langdon, op. cit., pp. 309, 321 ; cl the lines in the hymn, p. 335 :
" I am the child who upon the flood was cast out Damn, who on the
flood was cast out, the anointed one who on the flood was cast out."
2 Bergk's Lyr. Graec., iii p. 654.
198 GREECE AND BABYLON
cism when the tension of religious feeling destroys the
moral equilibrium or stunts development of other parts
of our nature, or prompts to acts which, but for this
morbid influence, would excite moral indignation. It
may display itself in the artistic and intellectual sphere,
as by iconoclasm or the suppression of arts and sciences ;
or in the discipline of individual life, as by over-ascetic
self-mortification. Its coarsest and most usual mani-
festation is in war and the destruction of peoples of
alien creed. A war or a slaughter is called fanatical,
if its leading motive is the extermination of a rival
religion, not for the sake of morality or civilisation,
but as an act in itself acceptable to one's own jealous
god. The ascetic type of fanaticism is specially a
product of the Far East : the murderous type is peculiar
to the Semitic spirit, when unchastened by a high
ethical sympathy or a sensitive humanism; for the
chief record of it is in the pages of the history of Israel,
Islam, and Christianity, so far as this last religion has
been in bondage to certain Semitic influence. It is a
question of interest whether we find fanaticism of this
type in the Mesopotamian area and in the ancient
polytheistic communities of the Western Semites. We
might expect to find it because of the intensity of the
religious spirit that seems to have been a common
inheritance of all these stocks. The more fervent the
worship, the more is the likelihood that the dangerous
idea of a " jealous " god will emerge, especially when
races are living under the illusion of the " fallacy of
names." By a fatal logic of devotion, the jealous god
may be thought to favour or ordain the destruction of
those who worship the deity under other names, which
meant, for the old world, other gods. Only this must
be carefully distinguished from the other more innocent
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT 199
idea, proper to all tribal religions, that the deity of
the tribe, like a good citizen, will desire victory for his
people's arms.
As regards Mesopotamia, in his History of Ancient
Religions Tiele finds in Assyrian history the same
traces of murderous fanaticism as in Israelitish. 1 So
far as I have been able as yet to collect the evidence,
this statement appears to contain some exaggeration.
For I have not found any record of a war that an
Assyrian or Babylonian ruler undertakes at the command
of a " jealous god " against a people whose only offence
is an alien worship. The motives for a war appear
to be of the ordinary human and secular kind ; Palestine,
for instance, is attacked, not because Marduk or Asshur
personally hates Jahwe, but because the country holds
the key of the route to Egypt. Such Biblical narratives
as the destruction of Jericho, Ai, and the Amalekites
find no real parallel in Mesopotamian chronicles. Yet
in these also the temper of homicidal religion is strong
enough to be dangerous. Neither in the Babylonian
nor in the Assyrian divinities is there any spirit of
mercy to the conquered. On that early relief of
Annabanini of the third millennium B.C., the goddess
leads to the king the captives by a hook in their noses
to work his will upon them. 2 And in the later records
of the great Assyrian Empire, the deities appear pro-
minently as motive forces, and the most cruel treatment
of captives is regarded as acceptable to them. The
worst example that Tiele quotes is the great inscription
of Assurbanipal, who, after speaking of himself as "the
Compassionate, the King who cherishes no grudge/' 3
naively proceeds to narrate how he tore out the tongues
1 Pp. 222-223. 2 Vide supra, p. 42.
3 Keittnschr. BibL> ii. p. 191.
200 GREECE AND BABYLON
of the rebels of Babylon, hewed their flesh into small
pieces, and flung it to the dogs, swine, and vultures ;
and " after I had performed these acts, I softened the
hearts of the Great Gods, my Lords/' But the lines
that follow suggest that what " softened their hearts "
was not so much the tortures and massacres, which they
might approve of without directly commanding, but the
religious measures that Assurbanipal immediately under-
took for the purification of Babylon, whose temples had
been polluted with corpses. Again, Tiglath-Pileser in.
speaks of himself as the Mighty One " who in the service
of Asshur broke in pieces like a potter's vessel all those
who were not submissive to the will of his god" ; x and
a little later, Sargon recounts how " Merodach-Baladin,
King of the Chaldaeans, . . . who did not fear the
name of the Lord of Lords . . . broke the statues of
the great gods and refused his present to me/ 7 2 Yet it
would be a misunderstanding to speak of these, as Tiele
does, as if they were wars of religion, like the Crusades
or the war against the Albigenses. Asshur sends the
king to the war invariably, but rather for the sake of the
king's profit and glory than for the propagation of
Asshur's religion ; for his enemies are very frequently
of the same religion as himself. The above phrases
must be understood probably in a political sense rather
than a religious ; the god and the king are so intimately
associated that whoever insults or injures one, insults
or injures the other. We may suspect that Merodach-
Baladin's breach of the divine statutes consisted in his
omitting to send his usual tribute to Sargon. When
two men had spoken scornfully of the gods of Assurbani-
pal, both the king and the gods would wish to avenge
the insult : 3 it was natural, therefore, for Assurbanipal
1 Keil Bibl, ii. p. n. 2 Ib., p. 69. 3 J6., p. 257.
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT 201
to torture and flay them. In warring against an alien
people, the king is warring against alien gods ; there-
fore if he sacks the alien city he may capture and take
away, or more rarely destroy, the city's gods. Thus
Asarhaddon had taken away the idols of Hazailu, King
of Arabia, and of Laili, King of ladi ; but when these
kings had made submission and won his favour he
returned to them the holy images, having first inscribed
them with his own ideogram and a mark of the might
of Asshur : l thus the gods, having the brandmark of the
great king and the imperial deity, become tributary
divinities. Or if he wished to wipe a people out,
the Assyrian conqueror might break their idols to
dust. Thus Assurbanipal broke in pieces the gods of
the Elamites the most deadly foes of Babylon and
thereby " eased the heart of the Lord of Lords." 2 But
many of the Elamite deities he led away ; and of one
of them he speaks in terms of reverence, Sasinak, the
god of destiny, " who dwells in hidden places, whose
working no one sees/' 3 It is more difficult to under-
stand why Sanherib should boast to have destroyed
the deities of Babylon after his capture of the city ; for
the leading Babylonian divinities certainly belonged
to the Assyrian Pantheon.
The evidence here quoted justifies us in attributing
fanaticism to the religious temper of Babylonia and
Assyria ; not because the wars were evangelising, under-
taken in the service of religion, but because the savage
cruelty that accompanied them is deemed, as it is in
the early Hebraic view, acceptable to the national
gods. The idea of divine mercy is potent in the liturgies ;
but neither morality nor religion would appear to have
inculcated any mercy towards the alien foe ; and this lack
1 Keil. BibL, ii. pp. 133-134. 2 Ib., pp. 203, 207. 3 16., p. 205.
302 GREECE AND BABYLON
of moral sympathy may be termed a passive fanaticism.
The same fanatic temper might be traced in the savagery
of the punishments for offences against the State-
religion, and was reflected also at times in the legal
code. 1
From other polytheistic Semitic communities we
have no record, so far as I am aware, that bears on the
phenomenon that we are considering, except the famous
Moabite Stone, of which the style is in this respect
strikingly Biblical. Mesha regards himself as sent by
his god Chemosh to take Nebo from Israel, and he ex-
plains why he slaughtered all within the walls, man,
woman, and child, " for I had devoted it to Chemosh. JJ
Fanaticism does not so naturally belong to polytheism
as to monotheism ; yet it seems that at times the poly-
theistic Semites could be as prone to this vice of the
religious temper as the monotheistic Israelites.
Speaking generally, and in comparison with the
ancient Semitic and the mediaeval and even later spirit
of Europe, we must pronounce the Hellenic tempera-
ment of the earlier and classical period as wholly innocent
of fanaticism. The history of Hellas is not stained by
any "war of religion " ; and no religious hierarchy in
Hellas ever possessed the power or displayed the will
to suppress art or persecute science and thought. It
might occasionally happen that individuals were in
danger of punishment if they insulted or openly flouted
the civic worship or introduced new deities ; but that
the State should protect itself thus is not fanaticism.
The least tolerant of cities was the enlightened Athens.
But her record in this matter is a spotless page com-
1 We note the indication of a cruel human sacrifice consecration
of a child to a god or goddess by fire as a legal punishment for
reopening adjudicated causes (Johns, Babylonian and Assyrian Laws,
etc., p. 95).
THE RELIGIOUS TEMPERAMENT 203
pared with the history of any later European State.
Hellas owed this happy immunity to her cooler religious
temper, to the equilibrium of the other life-forces within
her, and to her comparative freedom from dark and
cruel superstitious fears.
It is specially in regard to such salient features of
the religious temperament as we have been considering
that the early Hellene asserted his spiritual independence
of the East.
CHAPTER XII.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST.
RELIGIONS are often found to differ fundamentally in
their conceptions of the fate of the departed spirit of
man, and in the prominence and importance they assign
to the posthumous life. There is, in fact, a group of
religions which we might term " other-worldly/' because
certain dogmas concerning the world after death are
made the basis on which their aspirations and ideals of
conduct are constructed ; to this group belong Christi-
anity, Buddhism, Islam, and the old Egyptian creed.
There are other religions, also of a highly developed
type, in which eschatologic doctrine plays no forcible
or constructive part either in the theology or in the
ethics. Such were the Mesopotamian, primitive Juda-
ism, and the early Hellenic.
Our question concerning the evidences in the second
millennium of Mesopotamian influences on the Western
Aegean demands, then, at least a brief comparison of
the Sumerian-Babylonian, and Hellenic eschatology.
Our knowledge of the former is derived from certain
epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh, " The Descent of
Ishtar," and the poem dealing with the marriage of
Nergal and Erishkigal, the Queen of the dead ; secondly,
from a few inscriptions of various periods, alluding to
burial or the status of the dead ; thirdly, and this is
the most important source, from the recent excavations
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 205
of certain " necropoleis/' 1 The Hellenic facts have been
sufficiently set forth for the present purpose in a
former series of lectures.
In the picture of the lower world presented by the
two literatures, a certain general agreement is discover-
able, but none closer than they reveal with the con-
ceptions of other peoples. Both accept as an un-
doubted fact the continued existence of the soul after
death, and both imagine this existence as shadowy,
profitless, and gloomy. Both also vaguely locate the
abode of the soul under the earth, with a downward
entrance somewhere in the west. 2 In both we find the
idea of a nether river to be crossed, or " the waters of
death" ; 3 of a porter at the gates of "hell/* and of a
god and goddess as rulers of the lower world ; while the
mountain of the Babylonian underworld on which the
gods were supposed to have been born was unknown to
Hellenic mythology. 4 Such coincidences are no criterion
of a common origin of belief ; for these traits recur in
the death-lore of many and widely scattered races.
As against them, we must take into account certain
salient differences. The lot of the departed in the
Babylonian epic account appears drearier even than
1 Vide Dr. Langdon's paper on " Babylonian Eschatology;" in Essays
in Modern Theology (papers offered to Professor Briggs, 1911), p. 139.
2 Vide Jeremias, Hdlle und Paradies, p. 30; cf. King, Bab. ReL,
p. 46 formula for laying a troubled and dangerous ghost " let him
depart into the west ; to Nedu, the Chief Porter of the Underworld, I
consign him." The west was suggested to the Hellene because of
the natural associations of the setting sun ; to the Babylonian, perhaps,
according to Jeremias, op. cit., p. 19, because the desert west of Babylon
was associated with death and demons.
3 The *' waters of death " figure in the Epic of Gilgamesh, e.g.
King, op. cit., p. 169.
4 Vide inscr. of Sargon n. in KeiL BibL, ii. 2, pp. 75-77, 79 : '* Ea,
Sin, Shamash, Nabu, Ramman, Ninib, and their benign spouses, who
were rightfully born on Iharsaggalkurkurra, the Mountain of the
Underworld."
206 GREECE AND BABYLON
in the Homeric, just as the Babylonian religious poetry
inclines to the more sombre tones and the more violent
pathos. The dead inhabit " the house wherein he who
enters is excluded from the light, the place where dust
is their bread, and mud their food. They behold not
the light, they dwell in darkness, and are clothed, like
birds, in a garment of feathers ; and over door and bolt
the dust is scattered/' * This is more hopeless than
the Homeric meadow of Asphodel, where the souls
still pursue the shadow of their former interests, and
some tidings of the earth may penetrate to give them
joy. Also, the demoniac terrors of the lower world are
more vividly presented in Babylonian than in Hellenic
literature and art. The demons of disease that perform
the bidding of Allatu, the Queen of Hell, are closely
connected with the ghost -world ; we learn from the
formulae of exorcism that the haunting demon that
destroyed a man's vital energies might be a wandering
spectre. " O Shamash, a horrible spectre for many
days hath fastened itself on my back, and will not
loose its hold upon me. ... he sendeth forth pollu-
tion, he maketh the hair of my head to stand up, he
taketh the power from my body, he maketh my eyes to
start out, he plagueth my back, he poisoneth my flesh,
he plagueth my whole body . . . whether it be the
spectre of my own family and kindred, or the spectre
of one who was murdered, or whether it be the spectre
of any other man that haunteth me." 2
Now it is possible that the curse of the demon
was powerful both in the earlier and later periods of
ancient, as it is powerful to-day in modern, Greece ;
the demon might be a ghost or a revenant. And it has
1 Passage in "The Descent of Ishtar," Jeremias, op. cit., p. 20.
* King, op. cit., pp. 45-46.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 207
been the ambition of a small group of scholars in this
country to prove that the higher literature and art of
Greece, that reveals so fair and sane an imagination of
the unseen world, is only a thin veil drawn over much
that was grotesque and ghastly in the popular super-
stition. Even Homer reveals forms of terror in Hades ;
and we have ugly tales of demons sucking blood, and
ravaging the land like the TLotvyj of Megara, It is not
necessary to labour this point. Probably every ancient
race has been sorely tried at one time or other by the
burden of demonology ; even our hardy ancient kinsmen
of Iceland had their vampires and strangling ghosts, that
figure occasionally in their saga. But the great peoples
of our Western civilisation are those who have struggled
free from this obsession into the light of progressive
secular life. Such also we have the right to believe
was the early Greek, To draw the distinction too
sharply between the cultured and the unctiltured strata
may be a source of fallacy, especially when it is ancient
Hellas that we are dealing with, where the artist was
usually a man of the people and the people certainly
delighted in the work of their poets, and were strangely
susceptible to the healing influences of music. If Greek
poetry, then, and art strove to banish the ugliest forms
of the demon-world, and thereby worked with purifying
and tranquillising influence on the temperament, so
much the better for the Greek peasant. It is probably
wrong, therefore, to regard the average Hellene as a night-
mare-ridden man. But we might dare to say this of the
Babylonian ; and his imaginary terrors were fostered
by his religious liturgical poetry, and to some extent
bjr his art. For most of his hymns are formulae of
exorcisms, incantations against demons and spectres.
But such liturgy played relatively a very small part in
208 GREECE AND BABYLON
Greek ritual ; and this is one of the strongest facts
that can be brought to witness against the theory of
early Babylonian influence.
Yet both the Greek and the Babylonian feared the
miasma of the dead. Ishtar's threats at the portal of
Hell, a tremendous outburst of infernal poetry, is a
strong witness to this feeling: "Thou warder, open
thy door, open thy door that I may enter in. If
thou openest not thy door that I may not enter, I
will crash thy door into splinters, I will burst the
bolt, I will splinter the threshold and tear up the wings
of the door : I will lead forth the dead that they shall
eat and drink : the dead shall keep company with the
living/' What lends part of its force to this great
passage is the dreadful thought that the living should be
haunted by the multitude of the ghosts that would
pollute the living person and the light of day,
Shamash the sun-god is the natural enemy of ghosts,
and is therefore appealed to in the incantation quoted
just above to drive away the demon-spectres. He seems
to stand here in the same relation of antipathy to the
ghost-world as the " pure " Apollo stood for the Greek.
The mode and the place of burial will often throw
light on the feelings of the living in regard to the de-
parted. The peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture
interred their dead, Homeric society cremated them,
while the recent excavations have revealed that both
systems were in vogue side by side throughout an
indefinite period in Mesopotamia ; * and such being the
facts, we cannot safely deduce from them any marked
difference in spiritual beliefs. More illuminating is the
fact that the pre-Homeric society in Greek lands appears
generally to have buried its dead in or near their habita-
1 Vide Langdon, op. cit.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 209
tions, as if they desired the companionship of the spirits,
agreeing in this respect with the people of Gezer in
Palestine. 1 In Mesopotamia, though in very ancient
times the dead were sometimes buried in temples, the
fashion generally prevailed of establishing a necropolis
outside the city, as was the rule also in post-Homeric
Greece. This difference alone suggests that the fear of
the ghost was less powerful in pre-Homeric Greece than
in Mesopotamia.
It is clear, however, that the Babylonian, like the
Hellene, desired at times to enter into communion with
the departed family-ghost ; for in Mesopotamia, as in
Hellas, we have clear trace of <c parent alia/' communion-
meals to which the ancestral spirits were invited to feast
with the family. In the Babylonian phrase this was
called "breaking bread with" the dead: 2 the parallel
facts in Hellas are familiar to students.
Moreover, a certain general resemblance in the
funeral ceremonies can be detected between the Eastern
and Western peoples whom we are comparing. When
we examine these, we discover that neither the Homeric
nor the Babylonian epic-picture of the desolateness and
futility of the life in Hades corresponded altogether
with the popular faith as expressed in tomb-ritual. It
is true to say of all races that burial customs and
eschatological theory are never wholly harmonised by
any coherent logic, and generally reveal discord between
the dogma and the ritual. We can note this in ancient
Hellas and among ourselves ; and the discovery of Baby-
lonian graves reveals it in Mesopotamia. The things
found in these, toys for children, cosmetics for girls, 3
1 Cook, Religion of Ancient Palestine, p. 36.
2 Vide Langdon, op. cit.
3 Vide Prof. Margoliouth's article on "Ancestor- worship " in Hast-
ings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics.
14
210 GREECE AND BABYLON
show that the ideas so powerfully expressed in "The
Descent of Ishtar" about the barrenness and naked-
ness of the land of the dead were either not universally
admitted or not acted upon.
Those who equip the dead with some of the things
that were of use and delight to the living must believe
that the departed soul preserves a certain energy and
power of enjoyment, though a gloomy poet among them
may enlarge impressively on the emptiness of death.
The unknown Assyrian king who describes in an inscrip-
tion the sumptuous burial that he gave his father may
not have been of the same mind as the poet of the
Ishtar-epic concerning the laws of the Queen of Hell :
" Within the grave
The secret place
In kingly oil
I gently laid him.
The grave-stone
Marketh his resting-place.
With mighty bronze
I sealed its [entrance],
I protected it with an incantation.
Vessels of gold and silver,
Such as my father loved,
All the furniture that befitteth the grave..
The due right of his sovereignty,
I displayed before the Sun-God,
And beside the father who begat me,
I set them in the grave.
Gifts unto the princes,
Unto the spirits of the earth
And unto the gods who inhabit the grave,
I then presented/' 1
What is the meaning of the act of exposing the gold
and silver vessels to the sun-god Shamash before placing
them on the grave ? Was it done to purify them by the
aspect of the pure god and thus to fit them for the use
1 King's translation in Babyl. Relig., pp. 48-49. Cf. Jeremias, Hotte
u. Paradies, p. 12.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 211
of the glorified dead ? The evidence of the deification of
kings has been collected above. But the ceremony in
question is unique, as far as I am aware.
No doubt in ordinary Semitic burials there was great
variety in the grave-offerings : in the graves of Gezer in
Palestine, weapons, jewels, ostrich-eggs, seals, scarabs,
amulets, small figures in human or animal form have
been found. 1
In these practices the primitive Hellene and Semite
were on the same level, nor is it likely that either was
the pupil of the other. One important difference,
important at least for our purpose, we can mark,
which is connected with the difference between Hellenic
and Oriental climate. The Hellenic ghost might take
water among his offerings, and the neglected soul might
be pitied for being avwSpo^ 2 ; he might also eat his
porridge in the Anthesteria ; but he preferred wine, and
the offerings of blood the atfAuxovpfa and especially
the sacrifice of animals. And we may gather from the
painting on the Phaistos sarcophagus that the blood-
oblation to the dead was part of the pre-Hellenic ritual in
Crete. The triple-libation, also, that Homer mentions,
of wine, honey-mead, and water, and which the later
Greeks retained, may be regarded as a Minoan tradition,
for its great antiquity among the Aegean people is
attested by the libation-table found by Sir Arthur Evans
in the cave of Zeus on Mount Dickte. Here there is no
trace of the teaching of the Babylonian priest : nor in
the blood-offerings to the dead. For the Babylonian
ghost, parched with thirst in the intolerable heat of
Mesopotamia, craved not blood which, as far as I
know, is never mentioned in the description of his funeral-
1 Cook, The Religion of Ancient Palestine, p. 35.
2 E.g. Eur. Tvoad., 1085, <n> pAv (pdL^evos clXcuVets a^airros, civvSpos.
212 GREECE AND BABYLON
rites but beer in the earliest period, 1 and in the later
specially water. It is water that was supposed to
make the deceased comparatively happy :
" On a couch he lieth
And drinketh pure water,
The man who was slain in battle.
His father and his mother [support] his head,
And his wife [kneeleth] at his side/' 2
This is the lore that in the Epic of Gilgamesh is
imparted to the hero by the ghost of his beloved Ea-
bani, concerning the advantages of the man who gets
due burial over him whose corpse is thrown out into
the field, and whose soul wanders restlessly eating
" the dregs of the vessel, the leavings of the feast, and
that which is cast out upon the street."
The spirit's need of water has been an ancient tra-
dition of Semitic grave-tendance. It is expressed on
one of the cylinders of Gudea; 3 and in the Curse of
Hammurabi, which is a postscript to his code of laws,
he swears that if a man breaks them " his spirit in the
world below shall lack water/' 4 Clay-cylinders in the
museums of Paris and Berlin, that doubtless come from
Mesopotamian graves, contain inscriptions expressing
a blessing on the man who respects the dead, " may his
departed spirit in the world below drink clear water/' 5
The old idea survives in the belief of modern Islam
that the soul of the dead yearns for nothing so much
as that the rains or dews of heaven should fall refresh-
ingly on the grave.
These simple differences in the oblations incline
1 Langdon, op. cit.
2 King, op. cit., p. 176.
3 Ttmreau-Dangin, Les cylindres de Goud&a, p. 57 : Les heros morts
. leur bouche aupres d'une fontaine il pla$a.
4 Winckler, op. cit., p. 41.
s Jeremias, op. cit., p. 15.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 213
us to suppose that the primitive grave-ritual of Greece
was developed independently of Babylon.
Again, in Greece this tendance of the spirits, in the
case of the great ones of the community the king, the
hero, or the priest was undoubtedly linked at an early
period with apotheosis of the dead ; and actual hero-cults
and actual cults of ancestors became, as we have seen,
a salient phenomenon of Greek religion.
But if this phenomenon is to be noted at all in the
Babylonian, it certainly was not salient. We know
that under certain circumstances the king might be
worshipped in his lifetime and after, but we do not yet
know that the departed head or ancestor of the family
received actual cult ; where this is asserted by modern
scholars, 1 it may be that they have not paid sufficient
attention to the important difference that has been
defined between the tendance and the worship of the
dead. 2 This at all events, on the evidence already
placed before us, may be said : in respect of the frequency
and force of hero-worship, Mesopotamia stands at the
opposite pole to Greece, and in testing the question of
primitive religious influences of East on West this fact
must be weighed in the scale.
Evidence has been adduced pointing to an early
Greek belief that the spirit of the departed ancestor
might reincarnate itself in a descendant : a belief
fairly common among savage peoples. I have not
been able to find any indication of it in Baby-
lonian records, nor am I aware of any trace of it
among other Semitic peoples except, possibly, a late
1 E.g. Peiser, Sketch of Babylonian Society, in the Smithsonian
Institute, 1898, p. 586, speaks as if it was ancestor- worship that held
the Babylonian family together.
2 Vide my article on " Hero-worship " in Hibbert Journal, I99*
p. 417.
214 GREECE AND BABYLON
Phoenician inscription from the tomb of Eshmunazar,
King of Sidon about B.C. 300 : in the curse which he
invokes against the violator of his tomb he prays
that such a man's posterity may be rooted out : " May
they have no root in the world below, nor fruit above,
nor any bloom in the life under the sun/' * These
strange words contain the idea of a family-tree ; the
fruit and the bloom are the living members who are
in the light of the sun : the root are the ancestral spirits.
If the figure is to be interpreted literally, we must
regard these latter as the source of the life that is on
the earth, and the curse would mean " may the de-
parted ancestors no longer have the power to reappear
in the living/' But we cannot feel sure how much
sense we can press into the words.
So far, it appears that there was little or no com-
munion according to Babylonian belief between the
dead and the living, except at the family sacramental
meal held after the funeral. Only the vexed and
neglected soul of the unburied or the unhallowed dead
returned to disturb the living. And perhaps at times
the Babylonians, as the Israelites, resorted to '"necro-
mancy/* the evocation of the dead by spells, so as to
question them concerning the future. One evidence
of this is the passage in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where
the hero is able to evoke the spectre of his friend Eabani
and question it. This was probably suggested by an
actual practice, which is attested by such priestly titles
as " he -who leads up the dead/' " he who questions
the dead/' 2 In ancient Greece we have the further
evidence, which is lacking in the Babylonian record,
of actual vs%vo[fiocyrtiK or shrines where the dead were
1 V. Landau, Phonizische Insohr., p. 15.
2 Jeremias, Holle . Paradies, p. 37.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 215
consulted, and some of these may have descended from
the pre-Homeric period; for the evocation of ghosts
seems to have been specially practised in Arcadia, where
so much primitive lore survived.
As regards the higher eschatology, it would seem
that the Babylonian of the earlier period had not
advanced even as far as the Homeric, possibly the
pre-Homeric, Greek. For even in Homer's picture of
Hades and the after-life 1 there already is found this
important trait certain notorious sinners are punished,
certain privileged persons like Menelaos may be wafted
to blessedness; while in Hesiod the idea is outspoken
that many of the righteous and distinguished men of
the past enjoy a blessed lot hereafter. 2 Moreover, this
important dogma of posthumous punishments and
rewards is not confined to the world of mythic fancy in
the Homeric epic, to personages such as Tantalos, Tityos,
Menelaos : the average man in the Homeric period might
not hope for happiness after death ; but if Homer is
his spokesman he could fear special punishment, and
the threat of it was already a moral force.
There are two striking passages in the Iliad, of
which the importance for our present question is often
ignored : in iii. 278 there is reference to the two divinities
whom, with Aristarchus, we must interpret as Hades and
Persephone, who punish oath-breakers after death :
in xix. 259 the same function of executing judgment in
the nether world upon the souls of the perjured is as-
cribed to the Erinyes : the context in both passages
1 It would be idle for my purpose to distinguish between the so-
called " Achaean " and " Pelasgian " elements in the Homeric N&cwa ;
even if the latter ethnic term was of any present value for Greek
religion.
2 Hesiod, "Epy. 110-170 (the men of the golden and the silver ages
and the heroes) .
216 GREECE AND BABYLON
suggests that the poet is giving voice to a common
popular belief.
And in regard to posthumous happiness, early
Greece may have believed more than Homer reports.
For who can determine how early this eschatologic
hope came into the Eleusinian mysteries ?
The " threats of hell and hopes of Paradise " were
never wholly moralised even by later Greek thought ;
but here are the germs discernible in the earliest stage
of the religion from which a higher moral teaching
and a new moral force might emanate. But those
who have tried to discover similar ideas in the records
of Babylonian eschatology have hitherto entirely failed.
Certain phrases and certain mythic data may be, and
have been, pressed to support the theory that Babylonian
religion and ethics were not without some belief in
judgment and resurrection ; 1 but it is overpressure,
and the phrases may easily be misunderstood. No
clear evidence points to Babylonian belief in posthumous
judgment ; the title " god of judgment " attached
to Nergal might have merely a political significance.
Again, " awakener of the dead " is a fairly frequent
epithet of many divinities ; but no context where it
occurs suggests for it an eschatologic intention. 2 In
the story of Adapa, much of which is recovered from
the Tel-El-Amarna tablets, we find reference to the
" Food of Life " and the " Water of Life," 3 that the
God of Heaven might have given to Adapa and thereby
made him immortal ; and in the story of Ishtar's
descent, it is said that Allatu kept the waters of life in
1 Vide Zimmern in K.A.T. 3 , pp. 636-639; Jeremias, Hdlle u.
Paradies, p. 25 ; cf. his Die Babyl. Assyr. Vorstellungen rom. Leben
nacTi dem Tode.
2 Vide supra, p. 160.
* Zimmern, op. cit, t p. 520 ; King, op. cit., p. iSB.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 217
hell wherewith. Ishtar was restored. But nowhere as
yet has any hint been found that these waters of life
were available for any mortal man, and even Adapa,
the son of a god, missed getting them. In the myth-
ology of Babylon only one mortal, Utnapishtim, the
Babylonian Noah, passes without death to some happy
land and becomes immortal ; after the deluge Bel spake
thus : " Hitherto hath Utnapishtim been of. mankind,
but now let Utnapishtim be like unto the gods, even us,
and let Utnapishtim dwell afar off at the mouth of
the river." x Again, as the kings might be considered
divine in life, there was no difficulty in supposing that
they joined the company of the gods after death, as
was supposed in Egypt. The prayers offered to deities
of the lower world by the Assyrian king on behalf of
his father, in the tablet quoted above, may be thus
explained ; the nether powers are entreated to offer no
obstacles to his apotheosis. Other Semitic nations
may have had the same belief concerning the future
blessedness of the king ; at least an inscription of King
Panammu of North Syria, vassal of Tiglath-Pileser in.,
points to this, for his successor is urged to pray that ' ' the
soul of Panammu shall eat and drink with the good
Adad." 2
But no evidence has as yet been gathered that the
ordinary Babylonian expected any such distinguished
lot. Nor does it appear that prayers were ever offered
for his soul, as they might be for the king's, and as they
habitually were for the ordinary Athenian's in the
Anthesteria. For the Babylonian, on the whole, the
only distinction of lot between one person and another
after death was between him whose ghost was well
1 King, op. cit., p. 138.
2 Lagrange, tude$ sur Us religions $mitiques t p. 493.
2i8 GREECE AND BABYLON
cared for by surviving relatives and him who died an
outcast and was neglected. And this was no moral
distinction, nor one that was likely to engender the
belief in a righteous judgment. The duty to the dead
was a family duty merely ; nor can I find in the Meso-
potamian records any indication of that tender regard
of the alien dead which leads in Greece to a certain
higher morality, and which informs Homer's pregnant
phrase "it is not righteous to vaunt oneself over the
slain." We find Assyrian kings revenging themselves by
mutilation and exposure of their enemies' corpses ; l and
Semitic ferocity and Hellenic wb&g are nowhere more
vividly contrasted than in this matter.
Finally, there appears a difference in character be-
tween the Mesopotamian and the Hellenic deities who
were concerned with the surveillance of the world below,
In the religion of the Western people, the latter are as
essentially concerned with life as with death; and Demeter,
Kore-Persephone, Plouton, Zeus Xd6vto$, are benign
divinities whose sombre character is only the reverse of
the picture ; there is a chance of development for a
more hopeful creed when the dead are committed to
the care of the gentle earth-goddess : and It was through
this double aspect of Demeter-Kore that the eschato-
logic promise of the Greek mysteries was confirmed.
But the Babylonian Queen of Hell, Allatu, is wholly
repellent in character and aspect, nor do we find that
she was worshipped at all ; the only indication of a softer
vein in her is the passage in " The Descent of Ishtar,"
which describes the sorrow of Allatu for the sufferings
brought upon men through the departure of the goddess
of life and love. Nergal, who is probably an usurper of the
older supremacy of Allatu, has indeed a celestial character
1 Cf. Keil. BibL, ii. 109; Jeremias, Holle u. Paradies, pp. 13-14.
ESCHATOLOGIC IDEAS OF EAST AND WEST 219
as the tipper god of Kutha, but even in the upper world
his nature was regarded as terrible and destructive.
Only once or twice is the gentler Greek conception
concerning the rulers of the lower world found in
Babylonian literature. 1 Enmesharra a name that may
be a synonym for Nergal 2 is hailed as " Lord of
Earth, of the land from which none returns (Aralu),
great Lord, without whom Ningirsu allows nothing to
sprout in field and canal, no growth to bloom/' 3
Tammuz himself also is once at least styled " the Lord
of the lower world/' 4 And if Ningirsu is another name
of the underworld-god, which is possible, it is significant
that in an old Babylonian document the cultivator of
the soil is called " the servant of Ningirsu/' 5 These
isolated utterances, if they had penetrated the popular
religious thought, might have engendered a softer and
brighter sentiment concerning the world of death. But
it is doubtful if they were potent enough to effect this. 6
If the gentle Tammuz had displaced Allatu and Nergal
as the Lord of death, Babylonian eschatology might
have had a different career. But it does not appear
that he ever did. Deeply beloved as he was 3 he never
reached the position of a high god either in heaven or
the lower world. 7 Nor did his resurrection from the
1 Jastrow, op. cit., pp. 472-473.
2 Ib. 9 p. 473-
3 /&., p. 472.
4 Zimmern in Sitzungsber. d. Kon. SdcJis. GeseH. Wiss. 1907*
" Sumerisch-Babylonische Tanzlieder," p. 220.
5 Vide Jeremias in his article on " Nergal " in Roscher's Lexikon*
iii. p. 251.
6 It is doubtful if any argument can be based on the name Ningzu,
occasionally found as the name of the consort of Ereshkigal (Zimmern,
K.A.T. 3 , p. 637) and said to mean " Lord of Healing/* in reference,
probably, to the waters of life.
7 Only in the story of Adapa he appears as one of the warders of
the gates of heaven (Zimmern, K.A.T. 3 , p. 521).
220 GREECE AND BABYLON
dead evoke any faith, as far as we see at present, that
might comfort the individual concerning his own lot.
The personality and the rites of Attis, " the Phrygian
shepherd/' are closely akin to those of Tammuz, and may
be partly of Babylonian origin : and from these were
evolved a higher eschatologic theory that became a
powerful religious force in later Paganism. On the
other hand, in Babylonia the germs of higher religion
in the Tammuz-ritual seem to have remained unquick-
ened ; possibly because they were not fostered and
developed by any mystic society. For it is perhaps
the most salient and significant difference between
Hellenic and Mesopotamian religions that in the latter
we have no trace of mysteries at all, while in the former
not only were they a most potent force in the popular
religion, but were the chief agents for developing the
eschatologic faith.
This exposition of the Eastern and Western ideas
concerning death and the ritual of the dead is merely
a slight sketch of a great subject ; but may serve the
present purpose, the testing the question of early
religious contact. We have noted much general re-
semblance, but only such as is found among various races
of the world : on the other hand, certain striking differ-
ences, both in detail and general conception, that argue
strongly against the theory of contact or borrowing in
the second millennium. Nor can we discover in the
earliest Greek mythology a single Mesopotamian name
or myth associated with the lower world, 1
1 The story of Aphrodite descending into Hades to seek Adonis is
much later than the period with which we are dealing. Nergal's
descent to satisfy the wrath of Allatu and his subsequent marriage
with her (Jeremias, Hdlle und Paradies, p. 22) is a story of entirely
different motive to the Rape of Kore.
CHAPTER XIIL
BABYLONIAN, ANATOLIAN, AND AEGEAN RITUAL.
A COMPARISON of the forms observed in these regions,
both in regard to the minute details and to the general
underlying ideas, ought to contribute independent
evidence to the solution of our question. The trans-
mission of precise rules of ritual from one people to
another, implies an intercourse of some duration, and
more or less regulated ; for while the name of a god
or a single myth is volatile, and can be wafted down
remote routes by an itinerant trader, or nomad, or hunter,
the introduction of any organised ritual implies, as a
rule, the presence of the missionary or the foreign priest.
If, then, there is any evidence suggesting that Greece
in its earliest period learnt its ritual from Babylon,
the importance of this for the ethnic history of religion
will be great indeed. Therefore it may seem that a
detailed comparison of the Eastern and Western ritual
is forced upon us at this point : but it would be pre-
mature to expect at present any finality in the result,
because the Mesopotamian documents have only been
very incompletely examined and published by the lin-
guistic experts. However, the material that they have
presented to us reveals certain salient facts of immediate
value for our present purpose that cannot be wholly
illusory, however much we may have to modify our
interpretation of them in the light of future discovery.
222 GREECE AND BABYLON
As regards the Greek evidence, we are not without
fairly ample testimony concerning the earliest period.
The Homeric poems present us with the contemporary
religious practices of at least a portion of the population
whom we may conveniently call the Achaeans ; though
we have no right to suppose that they give us a complete
account even of those. Again, as ritual does not spring
up in a day, and has a singular longevity, we may be sure
that much of Homeric ritual is a tradition of the second
millennium. Furthermore, we can supplement Homer
by later testimony, of which the lateness of date is no
argument against the primitiveness of the fashions that
it may attest.
The first superficial comparison of Mesopotamian
and Aegean ceremonies exhibits a general similarity in
the mechanism of religion ; an established priesthood,
temples, images, altars, prayers, sacrifice, religious music,
holy days, consultation of the gods by methods of
divination, a certain ceremonious tendance of the dead,
these are common features of East and West. But if we
were comparing Hellenic with Egyptian or Vedic, or even
Mexican and Peruvian religion, we should be able to
point to the same general agreement in externals, and
many of these institutions are found broadcast over the
modern world of savage society. It will be more
important for the present question, if when we examine
the Babylonian, Anatolian, and Hellenic ritual more
minutely we discern salient differences, especially if these
are found in certain organic centres of the religious life
such as was the sacrifice. And we must first try to
determine whether the Hellas of the pre-Homeric days
already possessed all those religious institutions roughly
enumerated above. We can deal to some extent with
both these problems together.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 223
The erection of temples is an important stage in the
higher development of anthropomorphic religion. By
the beginning of the second millennium B.C. this had
become an immemorial tradition of Mesopotamia. But
we are not sure at what period the other polytheistic
Semites first evolved the architectural shrine, or how
long they were content to use the natural cave as the
house of a divinity, or a high place or " temenos " with
altar or sacred pillar. The recent excavations at Gezer
have revealed a glimpse into the religion of the prehistoric
Semites of Canaan ; and one shrine that seems nothing
more than a row of sacred monoliths, but also another
that has more the appearance of an elaborate building
of a sacred character. 1 Of still greater antiquity was the
shrine that Professor Petrie has discovered at Serabit in
the Sinaitic peninsula, an original cave-temple com-
plicated with the addition of porticoes and chambers,
which he believes to have been devoted to a double cult,
the Egyptian and Semitic. 2 At all events, we may
conclude that before 1000 B.C. most of the more cultured
Semitic communities in Asia Minor had come to house
their divinities in more or less elaborated shrines.
As regards the other race that dominated the early
period of Anatolian history, the Hittite, we have the
priceless evidence of the Boghaz-Keui monuments :
these reveal a complex temple hewn out of and into the
rocky ravine with a (( Holy of Holies " and what appears
to be a sleeping-chamber for the god. 3 In Phrygia, the
artificial shrine may have been late in supplanting the
natural cavern or hole in the rock that was once the
sufficient home of the cult of the great goddess. 4 From
1 Cook, The Religion of Ancient Palestine, p. 17.
2 Researches in Sinai, p. 72, etc., 186 : he would carry back the
foundation to the fourth millennium B.C.
3 Vide Arch. Anzeig., 1909, p. 498. 4 Vide Cults, in. p. 299.
224 GREECE AND BABYLON
the coast of Asia Minor we have no evidence concern-
ing the site of any ancient temple that carries us back
to the early period with which we are dealing. 1 But
the Homeric poems alone are sufficient proof that the
Greeks, for whom they were composed, were beginning
to be familiar with some architectural type of the
deity's habitation. Apollo Smintheus already has his
shrine and professional priest. 2 We hear of the temple
and priestess of Athena in Troy, 3 of her shrine at Athens,
which she shared with Erechtheus, 4 and the stone-
threshold of Apollo at Delphi, that guarded already
many treasures within it. 5 And we also know from
the excavations of the last few years that the Aryan
invaders from the North, the proto-Hellenes, would
find temples on some at least of the sites of the
Minoan culture. Crete has preserved certain shrines
of the second millennium; but except the temple-
cave on Dikte all of them so far are found to
be merely domestic chapels in the king's palace,
as though the king were personally responsible for
the religion of the community : and so at Mycenae,
Tiryns, and Athens, the oldest temples have been
found on the foundations of " Mycenaean " palaces. 6
But the temples of Hera on the public hill of
Argos and at Olympia are now dated near to
800 B.C. 7
We have, then, proof sufficient of temple-construc-
tion in Greece and the Aegean islands before the period
of Homer ; and if we must have recourse to the theory
that the peoples of the Minoan-Mycenaean culture took
1 Vide Hogarth's evidence for the date of the earliest Artemision,
Excavations at Ephesus, p. 244.
2 II, i 38. 3 16., vi. 269, 299-300. * Ib., ii. 550. 5 I&. ? ix. 405.
6 Vide Stengel, Griechische Sacral- A Itertumer, p. 17.
7 VideAthen. Mittbeil., 1911, pp. 27, 192.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 225
their cue in this important evolution from some foreign
civilisation, we should look to Egypt rather than to
Assyria, as nearer and more closely in touch with early
Crete.
We may mark here a difference between Eastern
and Western thought in the religious conception of
the temple. It was naturally regarded everywhere as
sacrosanct, because permeated with the virtue of the
divine presence; but Babylonia developed this idea
with greater intensity of conviction than the Hellene,
and actually deified the temple itself : the King Nabo-
polassar (circ. 625 B.C.) prays to it in such words as
these, <e Oh, temple, be gracious to the king thy restorer,
and if Marduk enters thee in triumph, report my piety to
him/* l Such exaggeration is not found in Greek religion. 2
As regards the emblem of divinity, the cult-object
set up in the shrine to attract and to mark the presence
of the deity, the Mesopotamian religion had, as we
have seen, already evolved the eikon or image at some
period considerably earlier than the second millennium,
and the statue of the god or goddess had become an
important factor of early ritual : only the emblem of
Asshur remained aniconic. 3 Of equally early vogue was
the image, whether human or theriomorphic, in Egyptian
cult. Again, the early Hittite monuments reveal it
clearly, though aniconic fetiches appear also on the
reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. But it is probable that the
Western Semites, and the tribes of Arabia before 1200 B.C.,
1 Vide Jeremias in Roscher, Lexikon, ii. p. 2347, s.v. " Marduk."
2 Something near to it would be found in the cult-phrase Zeite Naos
of Dodona, which is a form commoner in the inscriptions than Zei>s
Ndib?, if, with M. Reinach (Rev. ArcfaoL, 1905, p. 97), we regarded
this as the original title and interpreted it as " Zeus-Temple." But
the interpretation is hazardous.
3 A disk on the top of a pole, vide Jastrow, Rel, Bab. Assyr., vol. i.
p. 203.
15
226 GREECE AND BABYLON
and many of them for centuries after, preferred the
aniconic emblem, the " Ashera " or post, or heap of
stones or pillar, to the iconic statue ; in fact, that temple
idolatry in its developed forms as it presents itself in
later Mediterranean history was alien to the old and
genuine tradition of Semitic public worship. Iconic
representations of divinities may indeed be found in
Western Semitic regions, and some of these may be of
great antiquity ; such as the silver statue that Thutmose
in. (of the fifteenth century B.C.) carried off from
Megiddo and the Lebanon, 1 or the "Astarte' '-plaques
found on the site of Gezer.
But in Semitic communities of the earlier period such
objects belonged rather to the private religion, and the
public service centred round the sacred pillar or stone, as
was the case at Mecca both before and after Islam arose :
the evidence for this has been carefully given and
estimated by Robertson Smith and Sir Arthur Evans. 2
The same statement holds of many of the non-
Semitic peoples of Western Anatolia ; in Phrygia, for
instance, the earliest emblem of Kybele was the rude
pillar or cone-shaped stone, and this survived down
to late times in the worship of the Anatolian goddess
in some of the Greek cities on the Asiatic coast.
The recent discoveries in the regions of the Minoan
and Mycenaean culture reveal the same phenomenon : the
cults in this area of the Aegean in the second millennium
were in the main aniconic, the favourite emblem being
1 Cook, op. cti., p. 28.
2 Religion of the Samites, pp. 185-195 ; " Mycenaean. Tree and Pillar
Cult," Hell. Jouyn., 1901. It is interesting to note that Baitylos, a
name derived from the Semitic description of the sacred stone as the
** House of God," is given as the name of a divine king in the cosmogony
of Philo Byblius, Muller, Frag. Hist. Graec., Hi. p. 567 ; cf. the baitylos
with human head found at Tegea inscribed Aids SropTriw (fifth century
B.C.), " Zeus of the lightning" (Eph. Arch., 1906, p. 64),
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 227
the pillar or tree-trunk, while in ancient Crete the axe
and even the cross has been found. 1 Where the divinity
appears in full human shape, as the snake-goddess in the
chapel of the cross, the lion-guarded goddess or the
god descending in the air above the pillar on the Minoan
seals, these figures cannot, or need not, be interpreted
as actual temple-idols. And students of the religion
of classical Greece are familiar with the ample evidence
of the aniconic tradition in the \f6oi apyof, and the
cone-shaped pillars and stocks that served as divine
emblems in the later temples of Greece. 2
Now the ethnic question concerning pillar-cult has
been critically discussed by Sir Arthur Evans in his
treatise mentioned above ; and the conclusion at which
he arrives, that the striking parallelisms in Semitic
Anatolian and Aegean ritual monuments are not to be
explained as the result of direct borrowing from one
or the other group of peoples, but as the abiding influence
of a very early Mediterranean tradition, commends itself
as the most reasonable. It is legitimate to maintain
that the earliest Hellenes took over much of this aniconic
cult from the earlier Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation ;
but we must not overlook the fact that they also possessed
their own, as a tradition derived from Central Europe. 3
The most futile hypothesis would be to assume that the
early Greeks derived it from Babylon, where it is less
in evidence than in any other Semitic community. 4
1 Vide Evans, op. cit., and Annual of British School, 1908, 1909.
2 Vide my Cults, i. pp. 13-18, 102 ; ii. pp. 520, 670 ; iv. pp. 4, 149,
307 ; v. pp. 7, 240, 444-
3 For the evidence of a pillar-cult of Apollo Agyieus and Karaeios
coming from the north, vide Cults, vol. iv. pp. 307-308.
4 The pillars known as " Kndurru," with emblems of the various
divinities upon them, served merely as boundary-stones (vide Jastrow,
op. cit. t i. p. 191 ; Hilprecht in Babylonian Expedition of University of
Pennsylvania, vol. iv.).
228 GREECE AND BABYLON
The iconic impulse whereby the tree-trunk and pillar
were gradually supplanted by the fully human statue
was beginning to work by the time that the Homeric
poems received their present form ; for we have in the
Iliad* an undoubted reference to a seated statue
of Athena in her temple on the Akropolis of Troy.
We see here the working of an instinct that was
partly religious, partly, perhaps, aesthetic in its origin.
If we are to connect it with foreign influences,
Egypt is at least a more " proximate cause " than
Babylon.
This comparison of the cult-objects set up in shrines
or holy places must take into account the phallic emblem
also. This was much in vogue in the worship of Hermes
and Dionysos, and was not unknown even in the ritual
of Artemis. 2 Herodotus maintains that it was adopted
by the Hellenes from <f the Pelasgians," but, as I
have tried to show elsewhere, 3 we cannot attach real
value to his induction. It may have descended from an
old tradition of European cult, and it was indigenous
among other Aryan nations. As regards the Mediterran-
ean races, we find traces of its use in the Samothracian
mysteries and in the grave-cult of Phrygia ; while some
of the records of the Sabazian mysteries suggest that
a phallic character attached to them. The Minoan-
Mycenaean culture has been regarded as innocent of
this, since the phallic emblem does not appear among
the monuments yet found ; and this opinion is somewhat
corroborated by its absence in the ritual of Aphrodite,
who may be regarded as a direct descendant of the
great Cretan goddess ; for only a late and somewhat
doubtful text attests the dedication of phalloi to the
1 6, 269. 2 Cults, ii 445.
* Op. cit. t vol. v. p. 8.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 229
Cyprian Aphrodite. 1 But the evidence from the
Phrygian religion, that has many ethnic affinities with
Crete, and from such ritual-stories as that of Pasiphae,
ought to make us hesitate.
In Semitic ritual the emblem was certainly not com-
monly in public use, even if it occurred at all ; the evi-
dence for it, at present forthcoming, is at least very
doubtful ; two of the pillars found at Gezer have been
supposed to possess phallic attributes ; 2 but Robertson
Smith has well protested against the foolish tendency
to interpret sacred pillars generally as phalloi, 3 and even
regards Lucian's assertion of the phallic significance
of the two sacred pillars, each three hundred feet in
height, that flanked the propylaea of the temple at
Hierapolis, 4 as a mistake suggested to him by the
later Hellenic misinterpretation. Other statements of
Lucian in that treatise may cause us to believe that a
phallic character attached to some part of the ritual
of the Syrian goddess ; but, if it did, we could not safely
regard it as originally Semitic, since so many ethnic
strains are mingled in that complex religion.
It is doubtful whether we can recognise the emblem
anywhere in the religious monuments of the Hittites,
though Perrot would give this interpretation to one of
the cult-objects carved on the relief of Boghaz-Keui. 5
Finally, its vogue in Babylonia seems to have been
confined to private superstition ; from the second
millennium onwards it was employed as an amulet,
1 Arnob. Adv. Gent., 5, 19 (in the mysteries of the Cyprian Venus),
" referunt phallos propitii numinis signa donates."
2 Cook, Religion of Ancient Palestine, p. 28 ; cf. Corp. Inscr. Sem.,
i. IT. 6, inscription found in cave, dedicated perhaps by the hierodulai,
" pudenda muliebria " carved on the wall.
3 Rel of Sem., pp. 437-438.
4 De Dea Syria, c. 16 and c. 28.
a Histoire de I' Art, iv. pi. viii, D.
230 GREECE AND BABYLON
and one of the royal chronicles, about mo B.C., is in-
scribed on a tablet that represents a phallos ; but we
cannot argue from this or any other evidence yet adduced,
so far as I am aware, that the emblem was used in public
ritual.
So far as we can discern at present, then, the Baby-
lonian and Hellenic phenomena are divergent in respect
of pillar-cult and phallic ritual. 1
The most interesting part of our present inquiry
is the comparison of the ceremonies and the concept
of sacrifice in East and West. At the first glance we
note, as usual, a certain general similarity. In the
earliest period we find various animals, both wild and
domestic, offered upon the altars, but in Babylonia no
special rules concerning their sex, such as were pre-
scribed by ancient Greek and Judaic ritual. In all these
countries, again, bloodless offerings of cereals and fruits
were in common vogue ; and in the earliest Babylonian
period, these were of great variety, an inscription of
Gudea mentioning butter, honey, wine, corn with milk,
figs, dates, as the food of the gods, " untouched by
fire/' 2 We note here the distinction familiar in Greek
ritual, between g/^srypa and oforypa kpu ; only in Baby-
lonia it does not seem to have been of religious
importance, nor to have been developed, as it was in
Hellas, into a ceremonial law that might engender an
important variation in the moral ideas and religious
concepts of the worshipper ; for instance, the altar of
1 Jeremias, in his articles on " Izdubar " and " Nebo " in Roscher's
Lexikon, ii. p. 792 and iii. p. 65, concludes that a phallic emblem
was employed in the ritual of Ishtar ; but he bases his view on the
translation of the word ibattu in the Gilgamesh Epic, which is differently
rendered by King, Baby Ionian Religion, p. 163, and Zimmern, K.A.T. 9 ,
P* 572-
3 Thureau-Dangin, Les Cylindres de Goudea, p. 69.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 231
Apollo at Delos was called zadupog, " the pure altar/'
because no blood could be shed upon it, the sacrifices
of Athena Lindia at Rhodes, and of Zeus in certain
mystic rites of Crete, were aVupa, or " fireless," which
was the technical name for the oblations of fruits and
cereals ; and this fact of ritual suggested to later Greek
philosophy the ethical-religious view that the "pure,"
that is to say, bloodless, offering was the more acceptable
oblation, and was a tradition of the age of man's inno-
cence. This pregnant idea has not yet been discovered in
Mesopotamian or in any other old Semitic religion ; the
Babylonian deities received both kinds, and perhaps
simultaneously, though in certain special ceremonies
the sacred cake, or the liquid offerings of milk, honey,
wine, and oil, might suffice ; x while, according to the
ancient Hebraic view, as the legend of Cain and Abel
indicates, the deity appears to prefer blood-sacrifice,
though each species is recognised in the pre-exilic sacral
literature. 2
There is another distinction observed in Greek
ritual, that becomes of some importance in the later
history of ascetic purity, that between wineless offerings
(vqpakta) and those accompanied with wine : the
former being preferred by the powers of the lower world, 3
though not invariably, and certainly not by the departed
hero. However this distinction arose and no single
hypothesis explains all the cases it was not a Semitic
tradition, taught in early days to Hellas. For the
1 This may explain the double phrase, used concerning the institu-
tion and endowment of temple-rites in an inscription of the time of
Tiglath-Pileserm., which Zimmern translates by " Opfer-Mahlzeiten,"
KeiL BibL, iv. p. 103 ; cf. especially K.B. 9 in. p. 179 (inscr. of ninth
century) ; Zimmern, Beitrdge ZUY Kenntniss dev BabyL Relig., ii p. 99
(sacred loaves offered before consultation of divinity) .
2 Vide Robertson Smith, op. cti. 9 p. 200.
3 Vide Cults, i. p. 88 ; v. p. 199.
232 GREECE AND BABYLON
Semitic divinities, including Jahwe, have a genial liking
for wine " which cheereth God and man " ; l nor have
we any Semitic example of a taboo on it, except
possibly a late Nabataean inscription froni the neigh-
bourhood of Palmyra, mentioning tc the god who drinks
no wine/' 2 Such a phrase would certainly not apply to
the deities of Babylon ; even the sun-god, who in
Hellas appears to have been a total abstainer, is offered
wine in the Babylonian service, 3 and, according to
one verse in the Epic of Creation, the deities actually
get drunk, 4 a grossness which, in the mythic imagina-
tion of Hellas, is only imagined as possible for
Dionysos.
We have the right to say, then, that the avoidance
of wine in certain religious services of Hellas helps to
confirm the impression of its early independence of
Semitic influences. The Hellenic rule may, in certain
cases, have been derived from an older Aegean tradi-
tion ; for two of the deities to whom it was applied,
Helios and Aphrodite, may be believed to have been
bequeathed to Greece by the Minoan-Mycenaean re-
ligion; and wine appears to have been prohibited in
certain ceremonies of the Phrygian goddess, 6 and of a
goddess of Caria. 6
These are differences of some importance, and doubt-
less of great antiquity between the ritual of East and
West ; more insignificant, yet of considerable value for
1 Judges ix. 13 ; cf. Robertson Smith, op, cit., p. 203.
2 Lagranges, Etudes SUY Us religions semitiques, p. 506. This seems
to agree with the statement in Diodorus (19, 94) that the Nabataeans
tabooed wine ; yet Dusares, the Arabian counterpart of Dionysos,
was a Nabataean god.
8 Gray, Shamash Religious Texts, p. 21.
4 Dhorme, Choix, etc., p. 41, 1. 136.
6 Vide Cults, iii p. 390, R, 57^.
8 Ib. } ii. p. 646,
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 233
our present question, is the fact that incense was a
regular accompaniment of the Babylonian sacrifice,
but did not come into religious use in Greece till some
time after the period of Homer. The fact itself we may
consider as proved, both by Homer's silence about it,
and by the Homeric use of the word 6vog, which means
" victim/* and never " incense/' as in later Greek it
came to mean. Had the influence of the Mesopotamian
culture been as strong on Greece in the second mil-
lennium as it came to be from 800 B.C. onwards, we
should certainly have expected that the religious use
of incense, which is very attractive and spreads easily
from one race to another, would have been adopted
by Greek ritual before the time of Homer.
A more essential point is the sharp contrast pre-
served in the Greek rites between the Olympian and
the Chthonian ritual ; a contrast that demanded a
difference of terminology and dictated different sacral
laws concerning time, manner, place of sacrifice, and
choice of victim. So far, I have not been able to dis-
cover any hint of this important bifurcation of ritual
in any Mesopotamian record. The only nether-world
power who was worshipped at all was Nergal, whether
under this or other names ; and it does not appear
that his worship differed in any essential respect from
that of any other high god. In fact, the dualism between
powers of the tipper and powers of the lower world,
which has been generally remarked, and sometimes ex-
aggerated in Hellenic polytheism, only appears slightly
in the Babylonian, and seems to have left no impress
on the divine service at all.
As regards the animals of sacrifice, the only striking
divergence that Hellenic and Semitic custom presents
is in respect of the swine. The sanctity or horror with
234 GREECE AND BABYLON
which this animal was regarded by most Semitic
societies l is not reflected in any record of early Greek
feeling. Being the Hellene's common food, he offered
it freely to the deity, though in local cults there might
occasionally be a taboo on this as elsewhere on other
victims, such as sheep or goat. But it is possible that
some of the predecessors of the Hellene in Crete and
Asia Minor, if not in Greece itself, shared the Semitic
sentiment in regard to the pig ; and the reverence paid
to it in Crete, and especially at Praisos in later times, 2
may have been a legacy of Minoan religion; also the
Carian worship of Hemithea in which swine were tabooed
may have had ancient links with Crete. 3 But the facts
of swine-sacrifice or swine-reverence, though they serve
to distinguish the Hellenic from the ordinary Semitic
community, do not bear directly on our present problem,
the proofs of early Mesopotamian influence on the
proto-Hellenic race. For the usual Semitic taboo has
not yet been found in Mesopotamia. The pig is men-
tioned in a religious text as one of the animals that
might be offered to the gods as a vicarious piacular
sacrifice, nor is there any hint that the animal is being
offered as an unclean animal. 4 Certainly, other animals
are mentioned much more frequently as victims ; and
I am not aware of any other text that mentions swine-
sacrifice. It was associated in some way with the god
Ninib, one of whose appellatives means " swine " ; 5 but no
evidence is yet forthcoming that it was offered to him.
1 Robertson Smith, op. cit., pp. 272-273.
2 Athenae. 3760 (Cults, i p. 141).
3 Cults, ii. pp. 646-647.
* O. Weber, Damoneribeschwomng, p. 29 ; his note on the passage
" that the unclean beast is offered as a substitute for an unclean man "
is not supported by any evidence.
5 Zimmern, K.A.TP, pp. 409-410.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 235
A question now arises of greater moment both for
our present purpose and for the wider interests of Com-
parative Religion. Was the purport and significance of
the sacrificial act the same in the Western society as that
which is revealed in the sacred literature of Babylonia ?
No part of the ancient religious system has been the
theme of so much study and speculation in recent years
as the ancient sacrifice. Robertson Smith in his epoch-
making book, The Religion of the Semites, was the
pioneer of a new theory ; which has since been developed
or modified by certain English and a few Continental
scholars following on his track. The result of these
labours has been to formulate and define various forms
of sacrifice that prevailed in the Mediterranean area.
Three main types appear to emerge : (a) the gift sacrifice,
where an oblation is given over entirely to the deity,
whether generally to win his favour, or in special circum-
stances for instance, after sin has been committed to
appease his wrath, or as a thank-offering for favour re-
ceived ; (6) the communion sacrifice, where the community
or the individual eat with the deity, strengthening their
feeling of fellowship by a common meal ; (c) the sacra-
mental type, where the community or the individual
may be said to " eat the god/' that is, to partake of
food or drink made sacred by the infusion of the divine
spirit or personality, which is thus communicated to
the partaker. It is best for the present to regard these
three as separate and independent, without trying to
determine which is prior and which posterior. 1
The first type, which is almost ubiquitous in the
human societies that have arrived at the belief in personal
1 Robertson Smith's theory that the gift-sacrifice was a later
degeneracy from the communion-type is unconvincing ; vide specially
an article by Ada Thomson, " Der Trug von Prometheus," Arch. Relig,
Wissensch., 1909, p. 460.
236 GREECE AND BABYLON
deities, is sufficiently attested by Homer of the early
Greeks, who promise and perform the sacrifice partly
as an offering to please or to appease the deity. What
is more important is the evidence, which I have dealt
with elsewhere, 1 that Homeric society was familiar also
with the more genial conception of the sacrifice as a
communion-meal where the worshipper and the deity
meet around the altar ; this emerges clearly in the
accounts that Homer has given us of an Achaean sacri-
ficial feast. 2 Even the germs are already visible of the
idea from which the third or more mystic type of sacri-
fice, what I have called the sacramental type, might be
evolved ; for special significance attaches to the acts de-
scribed in the phrases ovXo%vra$ wpofiuXovro and ra-Xay^*
Ivuffuvro, "they threw forward the barley-shreddings "
and " they tasted the entrails " : the first phrase is
not wholly clear, but it may signify that stalks of barley
are first placed on the altar, and thereby consecrated
or filled with the divine virtue that is inherent there,
and then the beast is touched with these on the fore-
head and thereby becomes himself filled with the spirit
of godhead ; 3 the second is also a mystic act, for the
ff^Xdy^va specially contain the life, which is now infused
with divinity, and by tasting them the worshippers
partake of the divine life. All this arises solely from
the extraordinary degree of supernatural force or " Mana "
which the altar itself possesses, a force which may have
1 "Sacrificial Communion in Greek Religion," in Hibbert Journal,
1904.
2 E.g. IL, i, 457-474 ,* Od., 3, 1-4* J *4, 4^6.
3 Cf. Schol. Od., 3, 441 (who defines otfAo%tfrat as barley and salt
mixed with, water or wine ... /cat Wvov atfrd irpb rov iepelov . . . KpiB&s
S &4pta\op rots 6&ftu<rt xdptv eti<f>oplas) ; Schol. Arist. Equ., 1167, rocs dtificurur
eirtftdb\6fjtjHu [ic/>t0a(]. Vide Fritz. Hermes, 32, 235 ; for another theory,
vide Stoll, "Alte Taufgebraiiche," in Arch. Relig. Wissensch., 1905,
Beiheft, p. 33.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 237
been an inheritance from long ages of pillar-worship,
if we believe the altar to have been evolved from the
sacred pillar. 1 It explains other details in the old
Hellenic sacrificial act ; such as the casting the hairs
of the victim into the altar-flame, 2 which established
a communion between the animal and the deity, the
practice of solemnly consecrating the lustral water by
ceremoniously carrying it round the altar, 3 and charging
it with a still more potent infusion of divinity by
plunging into it a lighted brand from the altar-fire. 4
The communion sacrifice must then have been in
vogue in pre-Homeric times ; and the idea that gave
it its meaning never wholly faded from the State-ritual ;
for the rule, expressed by such formulae as ovx, uvopopci,
bcuvvcrSav avrov, bidding the worshipper conclude the
feast round the altar and take none of the flesh home,
seems to arise partly from the feeling that the ceremony
was meaningless unless he feasted wholly with the
deity. 5 But it was most vividly realised in the religi-
ous services of the 6iwoi, the later religious orders
or fraternities devoted each to the cult of its special
divinity ; for these a common religious meal formed
the chief binding-tie. 6
Apart from the Homeric evidence, we have the
record of the Attic Bouphonia as attestation of the
great antiquity of this type of sacrifice in Greece. To
1 Vide Evans, "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult/* Hell. Journ.,
1901, pp. 114-115.
2 Od., 14, 426 ; cf. the custom reported from Arabia of mingling
hair from the head of a worshipper with the paste from which an idol
is made.
3 Aristoph. Pax., 956.
4 Athenae, p. 419, B.
5 Vide Arch. Rel. Wiss. } 1909, p. 467 ; Thomsen there explains it
wholly from the idea of tabu.
8 The common meal of the thiasotai is often represented on later
reliefs, vide Perdriyet, " Reliefs My siens," Bull. Covr. Hell., 1899, p. 592.
238 GREECE AND BABYLON
the actual statement of the details given us by Theo-
phrastos and Pausanias, much is added by the curious
aetiological legends that grew up around it. 1 We see
the ox marking himself for sacrifice by voluntarily
going up to the altar and eating the corn upon it, being
thus called, as it were, by the god into communion with
himself. As he is thus full of the spirit of the god, it is
regarded a sacrilegious act to slay him ; but all the
citizens partake of his flesh, and even the stranger
who eats becomes himself a citizen, as through this
feast he enters into kinship with Zeus Polieus. All
this can be explained by the belief that Zens Polieus
is in the altar ; and we need not resort to such theories
as that the ox is a totem-animal or the spirit of
vegetation.
We must, however, beware of concluding that because
the victim was thus temporarily possessed with godhead
and in this holy state devoured, he was therefore literally
regarded as the full incarnation of the god, or that the
worshipper consciously believed he was eating his own
deity who died in the sacrifice. For religious conscious-
ness by no means always draws the full logical corollaries
of a religious act. The more mystic idea, that has
played a great part in the religion of Europe, can only
be detected or suspected, apart from written direct
ancient testimony, where the animal is treated with
reverence apart from and before his association with the
altar, or is regarded as the habitual incarnation of the
deity. The immolation and devouring of such a victim
would be of the true sacramental type, which Robertson
Smith believed was the aboriginal form of all sacri-
fice. But we have no clear example of it from the
earliest period of genuine Hellenic religion, unless we
1 Vide Cults, L pp. 56-58, 88-92.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 239
force the evidence or exaggerate its meaning. 1 We
have only certain myths that we may doubtfully venture
to interpret by means of this hypothesis. And these
are no myths about animals, but about human victims
devoured in sacrifice : the most significant is the story of
the cannibalistic feast held by King Lykaon, who cooked
his own son and offered the flesh to Zeus, a ritual of
which some survival, whether mimetic or half-real,
was witnessed by Pausanias himself on Mount Lykaon. 2
This would point to sacramental cannibalism, if we
assume that King Lykaon was the human incarnation
of Zeus Lykaios and that his son was therefore a divine
infant. But it is possible that the story enshrines
the remembrance of the more ordinary clan-sacrifice
of the life of a clansman to procure them communion
with the clan-god by the common partaking of his
flesh : the kinsman is offered rather than the animal,
not so much that the sacrificers may eat their god, but
that the god by consuming their most valued life may
be more closely incorporate with them.
Again, in one of the darkest and most perplexing
of Greek legends, the story of Klumenos of Argos and
his incestuous love of his daughter Harpalyke, who
revenges herself by slaying her own child and offering
it to the father in a sacrificial meal, we may discern
the glimmer of a remembrance of a cannibal sacrament.
The associations of the story dimly indicate a Thracian
origin. 3 And it is in the range of the Greek Dionysiac
1 In my article on t( Sacrificial Communion in Greek Religion/*
Hibbert Journal, 1904, p. 320, I have been myself guilty of this, in
quoting the story told by Polynaenns (Strafegem. 8, 43), about the
devouring of the mad buli with golden horns by the Erythraean host,
as containing an example of a true sacrament.
2 Vide Cults, vol. i. p. 145.
3 See Crusius* article in Roscher's Lexikon, s,v. " Harpalyke."
240 GREECE AND BABYLON
cult, which according to the most probable view was
adopted from Thrace, that we find imprinted on legend
and ritual the tradition of a savage type of sacrament,
in which the human or animal incarnation of the god
was devoured. Such is the significance that we may
fairly attach to the Titan-story of the murder of the
infant Dionysos, to the ^srapay^ of the goat or bull
or snake periodically practised by the Bacchoi or
Bacchae, and to the death of Pentheus. 1 And in later
Greek ritual the consciousness here and there survived
that the victim offered to Dionysos incarnated the very
deity, even before it acquired the temporary mystic
afflatus from contact with the altar. The record of
the ritual of Tenedos, in which a sacred pregnant cow
was tended reverently and the calf that she bore was
dressed in the buskins and then sacrificed to Dionysos,
" the render of men/' is the most piquant example, 2
This Dionysiac tradition reaches back undoubtedly
to the second millennium in Greece ; the evidence of a
similar sacramental ritual in purely Hellenic worship
is shadowy and slight, for the critical examination of
the Eleusinian mysteries does not clearly reveal it ;
and the growth and diffusion of the idea in later Pagan-
ism does not concern us now.
But the consideration of the early Hellenic sacrifice,
of which the salient features have been slightly sketched
above, is of signal value for our present purpose. For
it reveals at once a marked contrast to Babylonian
ideas so far as these at present are revealed to us. The
Babylonian-Assyrian liturgies, epics, and chronicles
have failed to disclose any other theory of the sacrifice
than that which is called the gift-theory. A general
1 Vide Cults, v. pp. 161-172.
2 IZ>., v. p. 165.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 241
term for the Babylonian sacrifice is " kishtn " or " pre-
sent/' l The deities are supposed to eat what is given
them ; in the Epic of the Deluge the naive phrase occurs,
" The gods smell the savour, the delightful savour,
the gods swarm like flies around the sacrificer." No
evidence is as yet forthcoming that the sacrificer was
supposed or was allowed to eat with the deity, as in
the Hellenic communion-sacrifice. On the contrary,
certain texts can be quoted which seem expressly to
forbid such a thing. 2 The document already cited
that was found in Assurbanipal's library, containing
the Job-like lament of the good man who had found
no profit in goodness, contains a verse in which he com-
pares himself with the sinner who neglects all religious
ordinances, and who has even " eaten the food of God."
And so we find that among the various evil or impure
or unlucky deeds that could bring a man under the
ban of the gods, the " devouring of sacrificial flesh "
is expressly mentioned. 3
Unless, then, documents yet to be revealed contradict
this positive and negative evidence, we have here a
fact of great weight to set against the theory that we are
discussing. Whencesoever the Hellenes derived their
genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-
meal, they did not derive it from Babylon. And all
Robertson Smith's speculations concerning the inner
significance of the Semitic sacrifice cannot yet be applied
to Mesopotamia, whence he was not able to glean any
evidence. In Babylonia the sacrificer got no share
of the victim. He might eat with the spirits of the
dead in certain ritual, but he was not, it appears, privi-
1 K.A.T*, p. 596.
2 Jeremias, Die Cultus-Tafel von Sip par, p. 26.
3 Zimmern, Beitrage zur Kennt. Bab. Rel., p. 15.
16
242 GREECE AND BABYLON
leged to eat with the god or goddess. The deity took
the victim, or the sacrifice of cereals and fruits, as a
present, and the priest got his share. But we are not
told that the priest ate with the god, or where he ate ;
nor can we say that the priest represented the worshipper.
If a true sacrament is yet to be discovered in Baby-
lonian religion, it will probably be found in some docu-
ment of the Tammuz ritual. For it is probable that
Tammuz was identified with the corn as with other parts
of vegetation, and that the mourning for him was
accompanied with abstinence from bread. His resurrec-
tion ended the fast, and if in their joy the worshippers
ceremoniously broke bread, they may have supposed they
were eating the body of their risen lord. But such
a reconstruction of the old Tammuz ritual rests at
present only on the indirect evidence of the later records
of Attis-Adonis cult and of the Tammuz-worship among
the heathen Syrians of Harran in the tenth century of
our era. 1
It belongs to the Babylonian conception of the
sacrifice as a gift, that the animal was often regarded as
a ransom for the man's own life ; that is to say, when
sin had been committed, the deity might be placated
by the gift of an agreeable victim, and be persuaded
to accept it in place of the sinner whose life was properly
forfeit. For instance, a sick man is always supposed
to have sinned ; and the priest who is performing an
animal sacrifice in his behalf uses the prayer, " Take his
present, take his ransom " ; 2 and the formula of a
sacrifice offered by way of exorcism is very explicit :
" A male sheep, a female sheep, a living sheep, a dead
1 Vide Frazer, Adonis- Attis-O sins, p. 189 ; cf. " Communion in
Greek Religion/* Hibbert Journ,, 1904, p. 317.
2 Jeremias, Die Cultus-Tafel von Sippar, p. 28.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 243
sheep shall die, but I shall live." * Another inscription 2
throws further light on the ritual of the vicarious
sacrifice : "To the high-priest may one cry out : the
kid of substitution for the man, the kid for his soul he
hath brought : place the head of the kid to the head
of the man, place the neck of the kid to the neck of the
man, place the breast of the kid to the breast of the
man/* Whether this solemn manipulation was per-
formed after or before the sacrifice, its object must have
been to establish by contact a communion between the
man and the victim, so that the kid might be his most
efficacious representative. It thus became part of
the higher ethical teaching of Babylon that " sacrifice
brings life/* just as " prayer takes away sin/ 3 a doctrine
expressed in a fragmentary tablet that contains a text
of striking spiritual import. 3
The type of sacrifice that may be called vicarious
must have been an ancient as well as a later tradi-
tion in Greece ; for the legends associated with many
sacrifices clearly attest it, explaining certain animal
victims as substitutes for a human life that was
formerly demanded by the offended deity, the vicarious
sacrifice usually carrying with it the ideas of sin
and atonement. 4 The substitution might occasionally
1 Weber, Ddmonenbeschworung, etc., p. 29.
2 iv. R 2 , pi. 26, No. 6 ; this is the inscription quoted by Prof. Sayce
(vide infra, p. 182, n.) as a document proving human sacrifice. I owe
the above translation to the kindness of Dr. Langdon ; it differs very
slightly from Zimmern's in K.A.T*, p. 597.
3 Jeremias, op. cit,, p. 29.
4 Kenan's thesis (C. I. Sem., i. p. 229) that the idea of sin, so
dominant in the Hebrew and Phoenician sacrifice, was entirely lacking
in the Hellenic, cannot be maintained ; he quotes Porph. De Abstin.,
i, 2, 24, a passage which contains an incomplete theory of Greek
sacrifice. The sin-offering is indicated by Homer, and is recognised
frequently in Greek literature and legend ; only no technical term was
invented to distinguish it from the ordinary cheerful sacrifice.
244 GREECE AND BABYLON
be apologised for by a legal fiction, as, for instance,
when in the ritual of the Brauronian Artemis the
angry goddess demanded the life of a maiden, and
the Athenian parent sacrificed a goat, "calling it his
daughter/' l
But though this idea is common to the Mesopo-
tamian and Hellenic communities, they differ widely in
respect of the evidence they afford, of the prevalence of
human sacrifice. As regards ancient Greece, the evidence
is indubitable, though much that has been brought by
modern scholars is due to false interpretation of ritual,
such as the scourging of the Spartan boys ; later, the
human sacrifice became repugnant to the advancing
ethical thought of the nation, but according to one
authority did not wholly die out till the age of
Hadrian. On the other hand, no literary text nor any
monument has yet been found that proves the exist-
ence of such a ritual in Babylonia. In one of his
biographical inscriptions Assurbanipal proclaims that
he " sacrificed " prisoners of war to avenge his murdered
father on the spot where his father was slain. 2 He
boasts of worse things than this ; and we can well
believe that he murdered them in cold blood. But the
1 Cults, ii. p. 441.
2 Vide K.A.T. 3 , pp. 434, 599, where Zimmern refers to the monu-
ments, published by Menant, Pievres gravees, i figs. 94, 95, 97, as
possibly showing a scene of human sacrifice. But Menant's interpreta-
tion of them is wrong ; vide Langdon, Babyloniaca, Tome iii. p. 236,
" two Babylonian seals " ; the kneeling figure is the owner of the
seal; the personage behind him is no executioner, but Ramman or
Teschub holding, not a knife, but his usual club. The inscriptions
published by Prof. Sayce (Trans. Soc. B-ibl. Arch., iv. pp. 25-29) are
translated differently by Dr. Langdon, so that the first one (iv. R 2 ,
pi. 26, No. 6) refers to the sacrifice of a kid, not of an infant. The mis-
interpretation of the inscription has misled Trumbull (Blood Covenant,
p. 1 66). The statement in 2 Kings xvii. 31 about the Sepharvites
in Samaria does not necessarily point to a genuine Babylonian ritual,
even if we are sure that the Sepharvites were Babylonians.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 245
words by no means suggest a ceremonious tomb-ritual
with human sacrifice.
Slightly more important is a passage in a legal
document, to which Mr. Johns * calls attention ; whence
it appears that a forfeit for reopening an already adjudi-
cated cause was the consecration of one's eldest child
by fire to a god or goddess ; and, as incense and cedar-
wood are mentioned in the same context as concomitants
of the threatened ceremony, the conclusion seems
natural that this was once at least a real threat of human
sacrifice inflicted as a legal punishment. This legal
clause gives us the right to conclude that in the earliest
period the Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia
occasionally resorted to this rite. They would be indeed
a peculiar people and a favoured nation if they had
always been innocent of it. It is sufficiently attested
by direct evidence, either of record or excavation, or
by the suggestion of legend, of the Arabs, Syrians, the
early Canaanites, 2 the Israelites, the Phoenicians ; also
of the Phrygians and other non-Semitic peoples of
Anatolia. Yet it must be put to the credit of the
Babylonian culture of the second millennium, that the
Mesopotamians had either completely or almost aban-
doned it. At this time it was doubtless in full vogue
in Greece ; and certainly Babylon could not have been
their evil teacher in this matter. But they needed no
teachers in what was an ancient tradition of their
northern ancestors, and of the people with whom they
mingled. Yet only twenty years ago a distinguished
writer on Greek ritual could say, " It is certain that the
1 Babylonian and Assyrian Laws, p. 95.
2 The excavations at Gezer have revealed almost certain evidence
of the early practice of human sacrifice ; a number of skeletons, one
of a girl sawn in half, were found buried under the foundation of
houses (vide Cook, op. cit., pp. 38-39).
246 GREECE AND BABYLON
Hellenes borrowed the practice of human sacrifice
from the Orientals." l
As we discover no trace of the idea of communion
in the ordinary Babylonian sacrifice, we are the less
surprised that scarcely any hint is given by the sacred
literature or monuments of any mystic application of
the blood of the victim, which was used for so many
purposes of communion-ritual by the early Hellenes
and Hebrews. I can find no other evidence for this in
Mesopotamia except one passage quoted by Zimmern, 2
in which the sacrificer is ordered to sprinkle some part
of the door with the blood of the lamb. It is not
probable that the Babylonians were incapable of the
notion that by physical contact with certain sacred
objects a temporary communion could be established
between the mortal and the divinity : it appears, for
instance, in one of the formulae of the purification-
ritual " May the torch of the Fire-god cleanse me " 3
in the yearly practice of the king grasping the hands
of the idol of the god, perhaps in the custom of attaching
the worshipper to the deity with a cord, 4 and in the
diviner's habit of grasping the cedar-staff, which is called
" the beloved of the gods/' 5 But it may be that they
never applied this notion to the sacrifice, so as to evolve
the institution of the communion-meal ; or they may
have evolved it in early times, and through long ages
1 Stengel, Die griechiscben Kultusalterthftmer, p. 89.
* K.A.T*, p. 599.
3 Jastrow, op. cit., i. p, 500.
4 Might this be the meaning of a line in a hymn translated by
Jastrow, op. cit., p. 549, " I turn myself to thee (O Goddess Gula), I
have grasped thy cord as the coid of my god and goddess " (vide
'Kmg i Babyl. Magic,No. 6, No. 71-94) ; or of the phrase in the Apocrypha
(Epist. Jerem., 43), " The women also with cords about them siFin
the ways" ?
5 Zimmern's Beitrdge, etc., p. 99.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 247
of power the priests may have become strong enough
to suppress it and to substitute for it the gift-ritual,
which would be more profitable for themselves. It
accords with this absence of any mystic significance in
the sacrifice that we do not find in the Babylonian service
any mystic use of the sacrificial skins, of which some
evidence can be gathered from various details of Greek
ritual. 1
Again, the Babylonian records have so far failed to
reveal any evidence for any such public ceremony as
the sending forth of the scapegoat, whether human
or animal, charged with the sins of the community.
This ritual was common to the Hellenes, Egyptians,
and Hebrews, and probably to other Semitic com-
munities. 2 The idea of sin-transference on which it
rests was familiar enough to the ancient Babylonian ; but
he seems only to have built upon this a private system
of exorcism and purgation of sin and disease for the
individual. As far as we know, it did not occur to him
to effect by this method a solemn annual expulsion of
all the sins of the nation.
On the other hand, there is another type of sacrifice
common to Babylonia and Greece, by which an oath
or an engagement might be cemented : the animal is
slaughtered with an imprecation that the same fate
may befall him who breaks his oath or violates the com-
pact. Zimmern quotes a good example of this, relating
to the compact made between the Assyrian king Assur-
1 On the famous bronze plaque of the Louvre (Jeremias, Hdlle und
Paradies, p. 28, Abb. 6) we see two representatives of Ea in the fish-
skin of the god ; and on a frieze of Assur-nasir-pal in the British Museum
(Hell. Journ., 1894, p. 115, fig. 10 ; Layard, Monuments of Nineveh,
i, pi. 30), two men in lions' skins ; but these are not skins of animals
of -sacrifice.
2 Vide rny Evolution of Religion, pp. 118-120.
248 GREECE AND BABYLON
nirari and Mati'ilu, prince of Arpad : 1 a sheep is
sacrificed and the formula pronounced : " This head
is not the head of a sheep, it is the head of Mati'ilu,
of his sons, of his great ones, of the people of
his land. If Mati'ilu breaks this oath, the head of
Mati'ilu will be cut off, like the head of this sheep."
The same idea underlies the oath-sacrifice in the Iliad*
though it is not expressed with such naive make-believe
or such logic in the detail ; but as the beast is slaughtered
or wine poured, a curse is uttered invoking on the per-
jured a similar fate, or with a prayer that " his brains
may be poured out like this wine. JJ The original idea
is magical : the symbolic explanation is later. Another
parallel is the Latin oath over the stone. 3
Such resemblance in special forms by no means
weakens the impression that we receive from the striking
differences discernible in the Babylonian and Hellenic
significance of sacrifice. To those already noted we
may add yet another, which concerns the association
of sacrifice with divination. It is Professor Jastrow's
opinion 4 that the chief motive of the Babylonian sacrifice
was the inspection of the liver of the victim, from the
markings of which the skilled expert could interpret
the future by a conventional system revealed to us in
certain ancient Babylonian documents. This super-
stition is so elaborate and artificial that if we find it
in adjacent countries, it is more reasonable to suppose
that one borrowed it from the other, than that it was
developed independently in each. We find it in later
Greece, Etraria, and Rome ; but the evidence of the
Homeric poems suggests that it was unknown to the
*,p. 49.
2 3, 300 ; 19, 265-267.
3 Polybius, 3, 25, ty& /j,6vo$ ttcirfooifii otfrws ws tiSe \lOos
4 Op. cit. t ii. p. 217.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 349
Hellenes of the earlier period. They are very likely
to have borrowed it from Babylonian sources in post-
Homeric times ; and we note here, as in other cases
where the influence of Babylon upon Greece can be reason-
ably posited, it reaches the western shores of the Aegean
at a post-Homeric rather than a pre-Homeric epoch.
The comparative study of Mesopotamian and Hellenic
sacrifice confronts us finally with another problem
belonging to the history of religions, and one of the
greatest, the dogma of the death of the divinity and
the origin and significance of that belief. For where
the mystic type of communion-sacrifice is found, where
the animal that is slain for the sacrament is regarded
as the incarnation of the deity, the divinity may be
supposed himself to die temporarily, doubtless to rise
again to life, either immediately or at some subsequent
festival. This momentous conclusion need not always
have been drawn, for religious logic is not often per-
sistently thorough, nor does the evolution of the idea
belong necessarily to the sphere of totemism, as Robert-
son Smith supposed, and M. Reinach is still inclined to
maintain. It is not my concern here to discuss the
totemistic hypothesis, but I may point out that in the
rare examples where the totem-animal is slain, it is not
clear that it is slain as a divinity.
Again, the belief in the periodic death of a deity
might arise independently of the sacrifice, namely, from
the essential idea of the godhead itself, when the divine
life is identified with the annual life of vegetation :
the phenomena of nature in autumn and spring may
suggest to the worshipper the annual death and resurrec-
tion of the god or goddess. It is important to note that
in this, as in the other source of the belief, the conclusion
need not always have been drawn, for the vegetation-
250 GREECE AND BABYLON
deity might be supposed not to die in autumn or winter,
but merely to disappear, and the story of his or her dis-
appearance need not carry the same religious conse-
quences as the story of the divine death.
The immolation of the divine victim in a communion-
service, wherein the worshippers partake symbolically
or realistically of the divine flesh and blood, though
suggested by a thought that we must call savage, may
be pregnant with consequences momentous for higher
religion, as the history of Christian dogma attests. And
even the annual death of the nature-god may be raised
to a higher significance than its mere nature-meaning, and
may be linked with the promise of human immortality.
We may note, finally, that a religion which expresses
in its ritual the idea of the deity's death and resurrection
is likely to be charged with a stronger emotional force
than one that lacks it ; for the two events will excite
an ecstasy of sorrow and of joy in the believer.
As the phenomenon, then, is of such importance, it
is necessary to be critical and unbiased in the collection
of statistics. Our present field of inquiry is the Eastern
and Western Mediterranean area; and here our con-
spicuous example is the ancient Sumerian-Babylonian
ritual of Tammuz, 1 a folk - service of lamentation
and rapture, psychologically akin in many respects to
Christianity, and of most powerful appeal.
The Tammuz hymns preserved to us are of the
highest Babylonian poetry, and though they are chiefly
litanies of lamentation, sorrowing over the death of
the young god, yet one or two echoes are heard at
their close of the rapturous rejoicing over his resurrec-
1 According to Dr. Langdon (op. cit., p. xvi.), the wailing for
Tammuz was developed in the early Sumerian period of the fourth
millennium.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 251
tion. 1 With them is associated the story of the descent
of his consort Ishtar, or of his goddess-sister ; another
great motive of the religious imagination which neigh-
bouring peoples and faiths were quick to capture and
adapt to their own religious use. We have seen 2 that
the evidence is clear that the life of Tammuz is the life
of the crops and fruits ; and we discern a pure nature-
religion unmoralised and without dogma, but evoking
a mood and a sentiment that might supply the motive
force to more complex and more spiritual creeds. It
was not suited to the religious atmosphere of the Assyrian
and Babylonian courts ; but its influence spread far
through Asia Minor. It captivated the other poly-
theistic Semites, and at times, as Ezekiel shows us, the
women of Israel, revealing to these latter, no doubt, a
vein of religious sentiment unknown in the austere
Mosaic monotheism. The ritual of Adonis is mainly
borrowed from the Tammuz service. For instance,
the rite of planting the short-lived " garden of Adonis,"
of which possibly the earliest record is in Isaiah xvii. 10,
appears to be alluded to in a verse of a Tammuz hymn. 3
The figure of Tammuz is primevally Sumerian ; there-
fore the diffusion of his cult among the various Semitic
communities does not enable us to conclude that the
death and resurrection of a divinity is an aboriginal
Semitic tradition. As regards other evidence on the
strength of which this dogma has been attributed to
them by some scholars, it is of late authority and of
doubtful validity. Josephus 4 tells us that at Tyre the
1 Langdon, op. cit., 300-341 ; cf. Zimmern, " Sumerisch-Babylonische
Tamuzlieder," in Sitzungsber. Konig. Sachs. Gesell. Wissen., 1907,
pp. 201252, and his discussion, "Der Babylonische Gott Tamuz/' in
Abhandl. Konig. Sachs. Gesell. Wissen., 1909.
2 Vide supra, p. 105. 8 Vide Langdon, op. cit,, p. 501.
* Antiqu,, 8, 5, 3 ; cf. Clem. Recogn., 10, 24; Baudissin in his
252 GREECE AND BABYLON
resurrection of Herakles was once celebrated by Hiram ;
but this might well be a derivative of the non-Semitic
Sandon cult of Tarsos, which will be considered below.
And the legend of the death of Dido at Carthage, even
if there is no doubt that the queen was originally
the great goddess of Tyre, is no sufficient proof
of a Phoenician ritual in which the divinity died
annually.
But as regards the non-Semitic peoples of anterior
Asia, the question of borrowing is more difficult to
answer with certainty.
No Hittite monument nor any Hittite text has as
yet revealed to us any figure that we can identify with
Tammuz. But certain indications incline us to believe
that the idea of the death of the god was not unfamiliar
to the Hittite religion or to some of the communities
under Hittite influence. On the Boghaz-Keui relief
we have noted the presence in the religious procession
of those mysterious animals, calves, or bulls, wearing
caps of peculiar Hittite fashion. 1 Are not these " thean-
thropic animals" to be sacrificed as a communion-
link between man and God? We know that the bull
was worshipped as an incarnation of a Hittite deity ;
and therefore from the sacrifice of the bull might emerge
the dogma that the deity ceremoniously died at certain
periods. From the sanctity of the bull in ancient Hittite
cult-centres may have descended the mystic communion
Eschmun-Asklepios (Oriental. Stud, zu Noldeke gewidmet, p. 752) thinks
that the Healer-god, Marduk Asclepips Eschmun, is himself one who
died and rose again in Assyrian and Phoenician theology. For Asklepios
of Berytos we have the almost useless story of Darnascius in Phot.
Bibl. t 573 H. ; the uncritical legend in Ktesias (c. 21) and Ael. Var.
Hist., 13, 3, about the grave of Belitana at Babylon (to which Strabo
also alludes, p. 740), does not justify the view that the death of Marduk
was ever a Babylonian dogma.
1 Perrot-Chipiez, Histoire de I* Art, iv. pi. viii.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 253
rite of the Taurobolion or Tauropolion, which Cumont
has shown good reason for supposing to have arisen
in the worship of the Persian Anahita, and to have
been adopted into the service of Kybele. 1
More direct evidence is to be gleaned from the cult
of Sandon or Sandes of Tarsos, a city which was once
within the area of Hittite culture. The god of Tarsos
comes later to be identified with the Tyrian Baal and
the Hellenic Herakles ; and the legend of the death of
the latter hero may be an echo of a /spoV \oyog of
Tarsos, inspired by an annual rite in which the god
of the city was consumed on a funeral pyre, and was
supposed to rise again from the flames in the form of
an eagle. 2 The later Tarsian coins display the image
of the god, the pyre, the eagle, the double-headed axe,
and the lion ; 3 and the last three of these symbols belong
to the oldest religious art of the Hittites. The proof
would be complete if it could be shown that the name
Sandon or Sandes belongs to the Hittite language. All
we know at present is that it is not a Babylonian or
Sumerian word, or found in the vocabulary of any
Semitic people. Prof. Sayce believes himself to have
found it in a cuneiform inscription of Boghaz-Keui.
This would be the direct proof that we require ; but the
word that he transliterates as Sandes is said to be the
ideogram of Hadad, the Syrian Semitic god, and that
Hadad is used as the Semitic equivalent of Sandes is
merely a conjuncture. 4
A still clearer and more striking example of the
phenomenon with which we are dealing is the Phrygian
1 Rev. de Philol., 1893, P- I 95-
2 Vide Frazer, op. cit., pp. 98-99-
3 K. O. Miiller, Kleine Schriften, vol. ii pp. 102-103.
4 Journ. Roy. Asiat. Soc., 1909, pp. 966, 971 ; the information about
the true meaning of the ideogram I owe to Dr. Langdon.
254 GREECE AND BABYLON
and Lydian cult and legend of Attis. The various and
often conflicting details in the story of his birth, life, and
death, the various elements in his cult, are known to
us from late sources ; the consideration of the whole
question would not be relevant here ; but it is necessary
for our purpose to determine, if possible, what are the
aboriginal motives of the myth and cult. It seems
likely that the earliest form of the Phrygian religion
was the worship of the great mother-goddess, coupled
with a son or lover, 1 a young and beautiful god who
dies prematurely, and whose death was bewailed in an
annual ritual, whose resurrection was presented in a
subsequent or accompanying service. Of the death
and the lamentation we have older evidence than for the
resurrection and the rejoicing, but the one seems to be
a necessary complement of the other. The family like-
ness of Attis to Tammuz strikes us at first sight. As
Tammuz appears as a young vegetation deity, identified
partly with the life of trees, partly with the corn, so
Attis in the Phrygian legend and ritual is presented as a
tree-divinity, and in the verse of a late hymn, which is
inspired by an ancient tradition, is invoked as " the
corn cut by the reaper/'
And these two personalities of the Sumerian and
Phrygian religions evoked the same psychologic senti-
ment, sorrowful, romantic, and yearning. The hypo-
thesis naturally suggests itself that the more Western
people borrowed the cult from Mesopotamia, and that
this had happened as early as B.C. 1500.2 All scholars
are agreed at all events that the figure of Attis belongs
to the older pre-Aryan stratum of the population of
1 Vide supra, p. 91 ; cf. Cults, ii. pp. 644649 ; iii. pp. 300305.
2 The Babylonian myths of Etana and Adapa, and their ascent to
heaven, may have given the cue to the Phrygian stories of Ganymede
and Tantalos.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 255
Phrygia ; modern speculation is sometimes inclined to
regard this as Hittite, and we know that the Hittites
adopted some part of the Babylonian religion. But
the name Attis itself is a stumbling-block to the hypo-
thesis of borrowing from Mesopotamia. Believing
Adonis to be a Western-Semitic form of Tammuz, we
can explain the name as meaning merely " the Lord/'
a natural appellative of the Sumerian god. But we
cannot so explain " Attis ." It is non-Semitic, and
must be regarded as belonging to an Anatolian language-
group, nor can we yet discover its root-meaning.
Again, there are many features of the Attis-worship
and legend that are not found in the corresponding
Sumerian, and one at least that seems essentially alien
to it. The death of the vegetation-god, originally
suggested by the annual phenomenon of nature, may
be explained by various myths, when the personal deity
has so far emerged from his nature-shell that he is
capable of personal drama. The death of Tammuz
does not appear to have been mythologically explained
at all. We may suppose that the killing of Adonis by
the boar was borrowed from the Attis legend, for in
Phrygia, and also in Lydia as the Herodotean Ates
story proves this animal was sometimes regarded as
the enemy that slew the god. It is a reasonable belief
that the boar came to play this part in the story through
a misunderstanding of certain ritual, in which this
victim was annually offered as incarnating the deity, or
was reverentially spared through a sacrificial law of
tabu. If this is an original fact of Attis-cult, it counts
somewhat against the hypothesis of derivation from
Mesopotamia, for the pig does not appear to have
played any such part, positive or negative, in Meso-
potamian, as in the ritual of the Western Semites and
256 GREECE AND BABYLON
on the shores of Asia Minor ; nor can any connection at
present be discovered between Tammuz and this animal.
But another version of the death of Attis, current
at some time among his worshippers, was that he died
from the effects of self-mutilation, a motive suggested
by the emasculation of the Phrygian Galloi. We have
here a phenomenon in the cult and myth that was alien
to the religious habits of the Mesopotamian communities.
The eunuch as a secular functionary is a figure belonging
to an immemorial social tradition of the East ; but the
eunuch-priest is the morbid product of a very few
religions, and there is no trace of such in Mesopotamia.
The Babylonian church-law demanded an unblemished
priesthood of strong virility, agreeing in this respect
with the Judaic and the Hellenic, and according with
an ancient sentiment that the vigour of the priest was
the pledge of that continued flow of divine power which
supported the vigour of the community. Self-emascula-
tion was penalised in the religious rule of Jahwe, and
the Gallos was excluded from temple-worship by the
ritual code of Lesbos. The records of modern savagery
and the history of ascetism, whether in modern and
mediaeval India or in early Christianity, afford us varied
illustration of the wildest excesses of self-inflicted
cruelty against the human body, but not so far as I am
aware of this particular form of self-destruction. 1
As a religious practice it is a special characteristic
of Phrygia, a land always fascinating to the student
on account of its strange freaks of religious psychology ;
and from Phrygia the practice spread into some adjacent
communities, such as Bambyke. One may be allowed
1 Dr. Frazer, in Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings (G. B., vol. ii.
p. 45), quotes from N. Tsackni (La Russie Sectaire, p. 74) an example
of a fanatic Christian sect in modern Russia practising castration.
I have not been able to find this treatise.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 257
to pause a little to consider the original motive that
prompted it. At first sight one is tempted to explain
it as due to a morbid exaggeration of the craving for
purity. But elsewhere, where this impulse was most
powerful, for instance, in the later Orphic and Isis cults,
and in early and mediaeval Christianity, it produced
many mental aberrations but not this particular one.
Nor, again, have we any reason for supposing this
craving to have been strong in the devotees of Phrygia ;
the Galloi of Bambyke, according to Lucian, were pos-
sessed by strong though impotent sexual desires and were
allowed full license with women. The form of com-
munion most ardently sought with the Phrygian goddess
and with the later Sabazios was a marriage symbolised
by a sexual act ; and Greek and Latin writers, both
pagan and Christian, agree in reprobating the obscenities
of Kybele-Attis worship ; we may note also that Phrygian
sacred mythology is somewhat grosser than the Hellenic.
We are compelled to seek another explanation, and
I can suggest none other than that which I have hazarded
elsewhere ; namely, that Phrygian religious emascula-
tion was an act performed in a frenzy of exaltation by
the priest or mystes desirous of assimilating himself as far
as possible to the female nature of the great divinity. 1
1 Vide Cults, iii. pp. 300-301. Dr. Frazer's theory is that the act
of castration was performed in order to maintain the fruitfulness of
the earth (op, cit., pp. 224-237). But this is against the countless
examples which he himself has adduced of the character and function
of the priest or priest-king as one whose virile strength maintains the
strength of the earth ; the sexual act performed in the field by the
owner increases the fruitfulness of the field (Frazer, GB Z , ii. p. 205).
Why should the priest make himself impotent so as to improve the
crops ? The only grounds of his belief appear to be that the priest's
testicles were committed to the earth or to an underground shrine of
Kybele (Arnob. Adv. Gent., v. 14, and Schol. Nikajn.d.Alexipharm., 7;
vide Cults, 3 ; Kybele Ref. 540} ; but such consecration of them to
Kybele would be natural on any hypothesis, and Arnobius' words do
not prove that they were buried in the bare earth.
17
258 GREECE AND BABYLON
The worship was under male ministration for the
highest part ; but for the full exercise of divine power
the male priest must become quasi-female and wear a
female dress, the latter part of the role being common
enough in primitive " theurgy." The priest is him-
self at times the incarnation of the young god, and is
called Attis. Therefore Attis was himself supposed
to have performed the same act, even at the cost of
his life. How early was this institution of a eunuch
priesthood in Phrygia we have no direct evidence to
prove. It may be a " Hittite " tradition ; for figures
that Perrot reasonably interprets as eunuch-priests are
seen on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui.
Returning to the topic of the death of the divinity,
we may assume that in Phrygia this was a very ancient
tradition, enacted yearly by a ceremonious laying out
of the vegetation puppet on a bier, or the suspension
of it on a pine-tree. We have no direct or otherwise
trusty evidence for the immolation of the priest who
incarnates the god; doubtless the stories about the
death of Marsyas and the harvest-sacrifice of Lityerses
point to a ritual of human-sacrifice; whom Marsyas
stands for is doubtful, but in the Lityerses legend it is
merely the passing stranger who is slain, and neither
of these traditions is explicitly linked with Attis-cult.
Finally, we may pronounce the hypothesis of the
derivation of the Phrygian cult from Mesopotamia to
be unproved and unnecessary.
Pursuing this phenomenon further afield, we come
to the area of Minoan-Mycenaean culture. If the
legend of the death of the Minotaur could be safely
interpreted as arising from the periodic immolation
of a bull-god, the idea that we are in quest of would
be proved to belong to the Minoan Cretans ; but the
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 259
frescoes of Knossos present that event with such a gay
and sporting entourage that one feels shy of forcing
a solemn religious significance into it. More important
for our purpose is the traditional Zeus-legend of Crete.
It is generally felt to be alien to the genuine Hellenic
tradition concerning their high god, as something
adopted by the immigrant Hellenes from an earlier
Eteocretan ritual and creed. 1 We have a glimpse of
a ritual in which the deity is born, is worshipped as
an infant, and then as a boy Kovpos, as he is invoked in
the new fragment of the hymn of the Kouretes and
especially as the son of a great mother, not as a mature
independent personality. Again, there appears an orgi-
astic emotion and passion in the ritual that strikes a
note in harmony with the Phrygian Kybele-Attis worship.
The very early associations of Crete and the countries
adjacent to the Troad are now being revealed by accumu-
lating evidence, and may point to an affinity of stock.
It may well have been, then, that the Minoan Cretans
had their counterpart to Attis, a young god who was
born and died periodically, whom they may have named
Velchanos, the name of the young deity seen sitting
under a tree on a Cretan coin of the fifth century. Though
in age and character so unlike the Hellenic Zeus, we
may suppose that the incoming Hellenes named him
so because they found him the chief god of the island.
We can also understand why the later Bacchic mystery
flourished so fruitfully in Crete, if it found here already
the ritual of a young god who died and rose again,
and why in later times the inhabitants celebrated
with such enthusiasm the Hilaria, 2 the Easter festival
of the resurrection of the Phrygian divinity.
1 Vide Cults, i. pp. 36-38.
2 Vide Evolution of Religion, p. 62.
260 GREECE AND BABYLON
This attempt to reconstruct a portion of old Cretan
religion on the lines of the early Phrygian has only a
precarious value, until some more positive evidence is
forthcoming from the Minoan art-record, which hitherto
has revealed to us nothing concerning an annual divine
birth and death. The ritual-legend is incomplete:
we hear sufficiently of the birth, and we may argue
a priori that a periodic ritual of the god's birth implies
a periodic death. Unfortunately all that we glean
from ancient literature is that there was a grave of
Zeus, perhaps in the Idaean cave, on which Pythagoras
is said to have written an epitaph. 1 But a sceptical
doubt arises here from the fact which was pointed out
by Rohde, that the grave of a divine personage was
often a misnomer of the underground sanctuary of a
chthonian deity; and either the Idaean cave or the
great cavern on Mount Dikte, whence the interesting
relics of an immemorial cult have recently been gathered, 2
might at a later period have come to be regarded as
a grave. Still, we may ask, could the phrase " the
grave of Zeus " have become prevalent among a people
with whom the worship of this god was still a living
creed, unless the faith also prevailed that the god who
died rose again to power ? In that case the " grave of
Zeus " could be a name for a sanctuary where the
ritual of the death was enacted preliminary to the
ritual of the birth.
This reconstruction then, and the a priori deduction
emphasised above, may claim to be at least legitimate.
Finally, some evidence may be added from Cyprian
cult for the view that the Minoan civilisation was
1 Porph. Vit, Pyth., 17 ; cf. Callim. H. ad. Jov,, 8 ; Diod. Sic., 3, 61 ;
vide Cults, i. pp. 36-3?-
2 Vide A. Evans m Hell. Journ.,x.vn. 350.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 261
cognisant of the dogma of the death of the divinity.
We hear of the grave of Ariadne-Aphrodite which was
shown in later times in Cyprus, 1 and the Cretan and
Cypriote legends of the maidens called Gorgo, Parakup-
tousa, and Galatea 2 reveal to us an Aphrodite who died
periodically and was laid out on a bier and revived*
The Aphrodite of Cyprus is most probably of " Minoan "
origin ; and, being a goddess of vegetation, the idea
of periodic death and resurrection might naturally
attach to her, and might be associated with another
type of ritual also, the annual casting of her puppet
into the sea, which probably gave rise to such stories
as the leap of Britomartis or Derketo into the waves. 3
We can now deal with the purely Hellenic evidence.
Confining our view first to the cults and legends of the
higher divinities of Hellas, we cannot affirm that the
death and resurrection of the deity is a primitive tradi-
tion of the Hellenes. We may suspect it to have been
a leading motive in some of the local Arcadian cults
of Artemis, if, for instance, we interpret the Arcadian
Kallisto as a form of the great goddess herself ; but
it is very probable that Artemis in Arcadia and many
other of her cult-centres represents the pre-Hellenic
divinity of birth and fruitfulness. What we may dare
to call the Hellenic spirit seems to speak in the answer
given by Xenophanes to the people of Elea when they
asked him whether they ought to sacrifice to Leukothea
and bewail her " : "If you regard her as a deity, do
not bewail her ; if as human, do not sacrifice/ 7 4
But when we descend from the higher religion to
1 Vide Cults, vol. ii. p. 651 ; cf. Clem. Recogn., 10, 24, "sepulcrum
Cypriae Veneris apud Cyprum."
2 /&., pp. 651-652.
8 Vide Cults, vol. ii. pp. 447, n. c., 478, 638, n. a. ;
4 Aristot. Rhet.> 2, 23.
262 GREECE AND BABYLON
the old Hellenic agrarian cults associated with the heroes
or daimones of the soil and field, we find evidence of
sorrowful rites, ceremonies of bewailing, which belong
to the same type as that of Tammuz ; and in the Greek,
as in the Babylonian, the personage to whom they are
attached is a youthful hero or heroine of vegetation :
such are Linos, perhaps the earliest theme of a melan-
choly harvest-song of pre-Homeric days ; Hyakinthos,
the " youth " of the Laconian land who may or may
not have been Hellenic, to whom the greater part of
the Hyakinthia were consecrated ; Eunostos of Tanagra ;
Erigone, "the early-born/' of Ikaria. The life of all
these passes away as the verdure passes, or as the crops
are gathered in ; and to one of them at least, Hyakinthos,
and perhaps to the others, the idea of an annual resurrec-
tion was attached. But none of these came like Tammuz
to play a world-part ; they remain the naive, half-
realised forms of poetic folk-religion. Like to them
is Bormos of Bithynia, 1 whose death was bewailed at
the harvest-time with melancholy songs, accompanied
by sad flute-music, and Lityerses of Phrygia, whom
the reapers lamented around the threshing-floor.
Shall we say that all these are merely reflections
cast afar by the great cult-figure of Babylon ?
Then we must say the same of the peasant-hero
" German " whom the modern Bulgarians adore and
bewail, of the Russian Yarilo, 2 and our own John Barley-
corn. And at this point we shall probably fall back
on the theory of independent similar developments,
and shall believe that peasant religion in different parts
of the world is capable of evolving strikingly parallel
Athenae, p. 620 A (^relv avrbv TQIJS a-rrb TTJS %c6/xxs perd TWOS jue/AeXy-
VOV Bprjvov Kal dya/cX^o-eoJs) ; Pollux., 4, 54.
2 Frazer, GB 2 , vol. ii p. 106.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 263
figures in obedience to the stimulus of similar circum-
stances and needs.
We have no surety, then, for a belief that Tammuz,
or any shadow of Tammuz, was borne to the western
shores of the Aegean in the days before Homer. And
we know that Adonis, his nearest Anatolian representative,
only arrived late in the post-Homeric period. Mean-
time, whatever view we may hold concerning prehistoric
religious commerce between East and West, this vital
difference between Mesopotamian and Hellenic religion
must be strongly emphasised : Babylonian liturgy is
mainly a service of sorrow, and part of that sorrow
is for Tammuz ; Hellenic worship was mainly cheerful
and social, and only in a few chthonian cults is a
gloomier tone discernible, nor can we anywhere hear
the outbursts of violent and ecstatic grief. In this
respect, and in its remoteness from any idea of the death
and resurrection of the deity, Hellenic religion was
further removed from that of Catholic Europe than was
the old Phrygian or the Sumerian.
The Babylonian temple-service was complex and
varied, and offers many problems of interest to the
comparative student. We gather that a Holy Marriage
was part of a religious drama perhaps performed an-
nually ; for instance, we find reference to the solemn
nuptials of Ninib and Bau, and to the marriage presents
given to Bau. 1 In every anthropomorphic polytheism,
especially when idolatry provides images that could be
used for religious drama, this ritual act is likely to occur.
It is recorded of the southern Arabians in the days before
Islam, an ancient inscription speaking of the marriage
ceremony of Athtar. 2 It is a marriage of the great God
1 Vide Tlmrean-Dangin, Vordemsiatische Bibliothek, i. p. 77.
2 Weber, Arabien vor dem Islam, p. 19.
264 GREECE AND BABYLON
and Goddess that according to the most reasonable
interpretation is represented on the Hittite reliefs of
Boghaz-Keui. We may conj ecture that it was a ceremony
of Minoan worship ; a Mycenaean signet -ring shows
us a seated goddess with a young god standing before
her and joining his forearm to hers, while both make
a peculiar gesture with their fingers that may indicate
troth-plighting ; a also, the later legends and the later
ritual commemorating the marriages of Aphrodite and
Ariadne may descend from the pre-Hellenic religious
tradition. Finally, we have fairly full evidence of the
same religious act in purely Hellenic cult. The kpo$
yoifjuog of Zeus and Hera was enacted in many com-
munities with certain traits of primitive custom ; 2
the nuptials of Kore and the lower-world god might
be found in the ceremonies of certain temples ; 3 while
the central scene of the Eleusinia, the greater if not
the lesser, included a Holy Marriage. 4 The Roman
religion, in the original form of which there may have
been no marrying or giving in marriage, no family ties
or genealogies of divinities, no doubt borrowed its " Orci
nuptiae " from the Greek. But for the other cases, there
is no need to resort to any theory of borrowing to explain
a phenomenon so natural at a certain stage of religion.
Nor is it an important phenomenon, so long as the
ceremony was enacted merely by puppets or idols,
as in the Boeotian Daidala. 5 It only begins to be of
higher significance for the history of religious practice
and thought, when the part of one of the divinities
in this drama is played by a human representative. For
not only does this offer indefinite possibilities of exalta-
1 Vide Evans in Hell. Journ,, 1901, p. 176.
2 Cults, L pp. 184-191. 3 Ib., iii. pp, 123-124.
4 Ib., iii. p. 176 ; cf. vol. iv. p. 34 n. b. 5 Ib., i. pp. 189-190.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 265
tion for the mortal, but it may engender the mystic
ideal and practice of communion with the divinity
through sexual intercourse, which played a great part
in Phrygian religion, and left a deep impress on early
Christian symbolism. The question whether the
Mesopotamian religion presents us with evidence of a
"holy marriage" solemnised between a mortal and the
divinity must finally involve the more difficult question
as to the function and purpose of that strange Mesopo-
tamian institution of temple-prostitutes. But, leaving
this latter alone for the moment, we find explicit testi-
mony in Herodotus to the fact with which we are
immediately concerned. In describing the great temple
of Bel at Babylon, 1 he asserts, on the authority of his
" Chaldean priests/ 5 that the deity chose as his nightly
partner some native woman, who was supposed to pass
the night on the couch with him, and who was obliged to
abstain from all other intercourse with men ; and he
compares a similar practice of belief found in the temple
of Zeus in Egyptian Thebes, and in the oracular shrine
of Apollo at Patara in Lycia. Now Herodotus' trust-
worthiness in this matter has been doubted by Assyrio-
logists ; 2 nevertheless, a phrase used in the code of
Hammurabi concerning a holy woman dedicated to
temple service, calling her " a wife of Marduk," seems
to give some colour to the Herodotean statement. 3
Only, this term might have merely a spiritual-symbolic
significance, like the designation of a nun as " the bride
of Christ " ; for the original Babylonian documents have
supplied as yet, so far as I am aware, no evidence of a
woman fulfilling the role of Belit, the wife of Bel.
ii, 181.
2 Vide, for instance, Dr. Langdon in the Expositor, 1909, p. 143.
8 Winckler, Die Gesetze Hammurabi, p. 182.
266 GREECE AND BABYLON
As regards the adjacent religions, the idea that a
mortal might enter into this mode of communion with
the divinity was probably an ancient heritage of the
Phrygian religions, for it crops up in various forms. The
priest of Attis was himself called Attis, and, therefore,
probably had loving intercourse with the goddess, and
the later mysteries of Kybele extended this idea and
offered to every votary the glory of a mystic marri-
age ; 1 it was the unconscious stimulus of an immemo-
rial tradition that prompted the Phrygian heresiarch
Montanus to give himself out as the husband of the
Virgin Mary. 2 It also appears as a fundamental tenet
of the Sabazian mystery and of the Hellenistic-Egyptian
Hermetic theosophy. The simple ritual-fact, namely,
that a woman serves as the bride of the god, could prob-
ably be traced far afield through many widely distant
peoples. According to Sahagun, 3 the human sacrifices
of the Mexicans had sometimes the purpose of
sending away a woman victim into divine wedlock.
In pre-Christian Sweden we find a priestess generally
regarded as the wife of the god Freyr, and enjoying
considerable power from the connection. 4 Similar
examples can be quoted from modern savage com-
munities. Therefore if we find the same institution
in the Mediterranean, we shall not think it necessary
to suppose that it was an import from Babylon or from
any Semitic people. As regards the Minoan worship,
it is legitimate at least to regard the legend of Pasiphae
and her amour with the bull-god as an unfortunate
1 Vide Dieterich, Mithras-Liturgie, pp. 126-127; Reizenstein, Die
hettenistischenMystevun-yeligionen.
2 Vide Herzog's Real-Encyclop., s.v. " Montanisnms.' 1
3 Jourdanet et Sim&on transl. of SaJiagnn, pp. 147-148.
4 Golther, Handbuch der GermaniscTien Mythologie, p. 229 ; cf .
Manahardt, Baumkuttus, p. 589.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 267
aetiologic myth distorting the true sense of a ritual
in which a mortal woman enjoyed this kind of divine
communion, and here again we should mark a religious
affinity between Crete and Phrygia. And it is likely
that the idea was not unfamiliar to the Hellenes, though
the record of it is scanty and uncertain. According
to the early Christian fathers, the inspiration of the
Pythia of Delphi was due to a corporeal union with Apollo
akin at least to if not identical with sexual inter-
course. Of more value is Herodotus' definite assertion
that the priestess of Patara gained her inspiration
by her nuptial union with Apollo. In the rare cases
where the cult of a Hellenic god was administered by a
priestess we may suspect that a /spoV ydfiog was part
of the temple-ritual ; in the two examples that I have
been able to find, the cults of Poseidon at Kalaureia
and of Heracles at Thespiai, the priestess must be a
maiden, as on this theory would be natural. 1 The
maiden-priestesses of the Leukippides, the divine brides
of the Dioskouroi at Sparta, were themselves called
Leukippides ; in all probability because they were their
mortal representatives in some ceremony of holy
marriage. 2 But the most salient and explicitly recorded
example is the yearly marriage of the Queen-Archon
at Athens with Dionysos, the bull-god, in the feast of
Anthesteria, the significance of which I have discussed
elsewhere. 3 It seems that the Queen by uniting her
body with the god's, unites to him the whole Athenian
state and secures its prosperity and fruitfulness ; this
historic fact may also explain the myth of the union
1 Pausan., 2, 33, 3; 9, 27, 6 ; cf. my article in Arckiv. fur Religionswiss.,
1904, p. 74 ; E. Fehrle, Die Kultische Keuschheit im AHerthum, p. 223,
gives other examples which appear to me more doubtful.
2 Paus., 3, 16, i.
8 Cults, v. pp. 217-219.
268 GREECE AND BABYLON
of Althaia, Queen of Kalydon, with, the same god.
Finally, let us observe that nothing in any of these
Hellenic records suggests any element of what we
should call impurity in the ritual ; we are not told that
these holy marriages were ever consummated by the
priest as the human representative of the god ; or that
the ceremony involved any real loss of virginity in
the maiden-priestess. The marriage could have been
consummated symbolically by use of a puppet or image
of the deity. We may believe that the rite descends
from pre-Homeric antiquity ; the ritual which the
Queen-Archon performed might naturally have been
established at the time of the adoption into Athens
of the Dionysiac cult, and there are reasons for dating
this event earlier than 1000 B.C. 1
We now come to a very difficult and important
question concerning the position of women in the old
Mesopotamian temple-ritual. Our first document of
value is the code of Hammurabi, in which we find
certain social regulations concerning the status of a
class of women designated by a name which Winckler
translates doubtfully as " God's-sisters," regarding it,
however, as equivalent to consecrated, while Johns trans-
lates it merely as "votary/ 5 2 At least, we have proof
of a class of holy women who have certain privileges
and are under certain restrictions. They were the
daughters of good families dedicated by their fathers
to religion ; they could inherit property, which was
exempt from the burden of army-tax ; they could not
marry, and were prohibited from setting-up or even
entering a wine-shop under penalty of death. It is
something to know even as much as this about them,
1 Vide Cults, v. p. 109.
2 Winckler, op. tit., p. no ; Johns, op. cit, t p. 54.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 269
but we would very gladly learn more. Is it to their
order that the personage described as " the wife of
Marduk'' 1 belongs, who has been considered above?
Is it from among them that the priestesses of Ishtar
were chosen, who interpreted the oracles of the goddess ? 2
It seems clear that a father could dedicate his daughter
to any divinity, that their position was honourable,
and that they are not to be identified with the temple-
prostitutes of Babylon or Erech, who excited the wonder
and often the reprobation of the later Greek world.
This peculiar order of temple-harlots is also recognised
according to some of the best authorities 3 in Ham-
murabi's code, where they are mentioned in the same
context with the " consecrated " or the " God-sisters,"
and yet are clearly distinct from them ; another clause
seems to refer to male prostitutes ( 187). Certain rules
are laid down concerning their inheritance of property,
and concerning the rearing of their children, if they had
any, who might be adopted into private families. Evi-
dently these " Qadishtu " were a permanent institution,
and there is no hint of any dishonour. There may be
other references in Babylonian literature to these temple-
women ; in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the courtesan who
won over Eabani evidently belongs to the retinue of
Ishtar of Erech.
From these two institutions we must distinguish that
other, for which Herodotus is our earliest authority : 4
according to his explicit statement, once in her lifetime
every Babylonian woman, high or low, had to stand in
the temple-precincts of the goddess Mylitta probably a
1 Code, 182.
2 Jastrow, op. cit. t ii 157.*
3 Vide Winckler's interpretation of 178, 180, 181 ; cf. also
Zimmern in K.A.T. 3 , 423.
4 i, 199-
270 GREECE AND BABYLON
functional appellative of Ishtar, meaning "the helper
of childbirth " and to prostitute herself to any stranger
who threw money into her lap and claimed her with
the formula, <c I invoke the goddess Mylitta for you."
Herodotus hastens to assure us that this single act of
unchastity which took place outside the temple did
not afterwards lower the morality of the women, who,
as he declares, were otherwise exemplary in this respect.
But he is evidently shocked by the custom, and the
early Christian and modern writers have quoted it as
the worst example of gross pagan or Oriental licentious-
ness. Some devoted Assyriologists have tried to throw
doubt on the historian's veracity : 1 the wish is father
to the thought : and it is indeed difficult for the
ordinary civilised man to understand how an ancient
civilisation of otherwise advanced morality could have
sanctioned such a practice. But Herodotus* testimony
ought not to be so impugned ; nor is it sufficient evidence
for rejecting it that no reference to the custom which
he describes has been found hitherto in the cuneiform
literature. Strabo merely repeats what Herodotus
has said ; but independent evidence of some value is
gathered from the apocryphal Epistle of Jeremias : 2
" The women also with cords about them sit in the ways,
burning bran for incense ; but if any of them, drawn
by some that pass by, lie with them, she reproacheth
her fellow that she was not thought as worthy as herself,
nor her cord broken/' The context is altogether
religious, and this is no ordinary secular immorality ;
certain details in the narrative remind us of Herodotus,
and make it clear that the writer has in mind the same
social usage that the historian vouches for. This usage
may be described as the consecration to the goddess of
1 E.g. Zimmern ia K.A.T.*, p. 423. 2 Verse 43.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 271
the first-fruits of the woman f s virginity before marriage ;
for, though Herodotus does not explicitly say that it
was a rite preliminary to marriage, yet the records of
similar practices elsewhere in Asia Minor assure us on
this point.
We have now to begin the comparative search in
the adjacent regions, keeping distinct the three types
of consecration which I have specified above, which are
too often confused. 1
The first type has its close analogies with the early
Christian, mediaeval, and modern conventual life of
women. The code of Hammurabi presents us with the
earliest example of what may be called the religious
sisterhood ; the Babylonian votaries were dedicated to
religion, and while the Christian nuns are often called
the brides of Christ, their earliest prototypes enjoyed
the less questionable title of " God's-sisters." We
find no exact parallel to this practice in ancient Greece ;
from the earliest period, no doubt, the custom prevailed
of consecrating individual women of certain families as
priestesses to serve certain cults, and sometimes chastity
was enforced upon them ; but these did not form a
conventual society ; and usually, apart from their
occasional religious duties, they could lead a secular
life. In fact, the monastic system was of Eastern origin
and only reached Europe in later times, being opposed
1 The first to insist emphatically on the necessity of their distinc-
tion was Mr. Hartland, in Anthropological Essays presented to E. B.
TyloY, pp. 190-191; but he has there, I think, wrongly classified through
a misunderstanding of a phrase in Aelian the Lydian custom that
Herodotus (r, 93) and Aelian (Var. Hist., iv. i) refer to ; both these
writers mention the custom of the women of Lydia practising pros-
titution before marriage. Aelian does not mention the motive that
Herodotus assigns, the collection of a dowry; neither associates it
with religion. Aelian merely adds that when once married the
Lydian women were virtuous ; this need have nothing to do with the
Mylitta-rite.
GREECE AND BABYLON
to the civic character of the religion of the old Aryan
states.
The second class of consecrated women served as
temple-harlots in certain cult-centres of Asia Minor.
We cannot say that the custom in all cases emanated
from Babylon ; for there is reason to think that it was a
tradition attaching to the cult of the goddess among the
polytheistic Semitic stocks. We have clear allusions
in the Bible to temple-prostitution practised by both
sexes in the Canaanite communities adjacent to the
Israelites, who were themselves sometimes contaminated
by the practice. 1 We hear of " hierodouli " among the
pagan Arabs, 2 of women " of the congregation of the
people of Astarte " at Carthage, 3 of numbers of dedicated
slave women in the cult of Aphrodite at Eryx, 4 which
was at least semi-Semitic ; and it is likely that some
of these at least were devoted to the impure religious
practice. As regards non-Semitic worships, it is only
clearly attested of two, namely, of the worship of Ma
at Comana in Pontos, 5 and of Aphrodite Ourania in
Corinth. 6 In these cases we have the right to assume
Semitic influences at work ; for we do not find traces
of this practice in the ancient cult of Kybele ; and Ma
of Cappadocia and Pontus, who had affinities with her,
was partly contaminated with Anahita, a Persian
goddess, who had taken on Babylonian fashions. Nor
can we doubt that the practice gained recognition at
Corinth in post-Homeric times through its Oriental
trade ; for it was attached to the cult of Aphrodite
1 E.g. Hosea iv. 13 ; Deut. xxiii. 18 ; i Kings xiv. 24.
2 Weber, Ardbien vor dem Islam, p. 18.
3 C. 7. Sem., i, 263.
4 Strab., 272.
5 Strab., 559.
6 Find. Frag., 87 ; Strab., 378 ; (Cults, il p. 746, R. 992).
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 273
Ourania, whose personality, partly at least, was identical
with that of the Semitic goddess. The practice sur-
vived in Lydia in the later period of the Graeco-Roman
culture. For a woman of Tralles, by name Aurelia
Aemilia, erected a column with an inscription that
has been published by /Sir William Ramsay, 1 in which
she proclaims with pride that she had prostituted
herself in the temple service " at the command of an
oracle/' and that her female ancestors had done like-
wise. Finally, we may find the cult-practice reflected in
certain legends ; in the legend of Iconium, for instance,
of the woman who enticed all strangers to her embraces
and afterwards slew them, but was herself turned to
stone by Perseus, and whose stone image gave the name
to the State. 2
The other custom recorded by Herodotus of
Babylon, the consecration of the first-fruits of virginity
to the goddess before marriage, which I have con-
sidered as distinct from the foregoing, may often have
been combined or confused with it ; for the temple-
harlotry, carried on for some considerable period,
might be occasionally a preliminary to marriage. The
most exact parallels to the Babylonian custom are found
in the records of Byblos, Cyprus, and the Syrian Helio-
polis or Baalbec. Lucian attests the rule prevailing
at Byblos, that in the festival of Adonis women ex-
posed themselves for purchase on one single day, and
1 Cities and Bishoprics, I 94. In his comment he rightly points
out that the woman is Lydian, as her name is not genuine Roman ;
but he is wrong in speaking of her service as performed to a god
(Frazer, Adonis, etc., p. 34, follows him). This would be a unique fact,
for the service in Asia Minor is always to a goddess ; but the inscrip-
tion neither mentions nor implies a god. The bride of Zeus at Egyptian
Thebes was also a temple-harlot, if we could believe Strabo, p. 816 ;
but on this point he contradicts Herodotus, i, 182.
z Et. Mag., s.v. 'i
18
274 GREECE AND BABYLON
that only strangers were allowed to enjoy them ; but
that this service was only imposed upon them if they
refused to cut off their hair in lamentation for Adonis. 1
Similarly the Byzantine historian Sozomenos declared
that at Heliopolis (Baalbec), in the temple of Astarte,
each maiden was obliged to prostitute herself before
marriage, until the custom and the cult were abolished
by Constantine. 2 The statements about Cyprus, though
less explicit, point to the same institution : Herodotus,
having described at length the Babylonian practice,
declares that it prevailed in Cyprus also, and Justin 3
that it was a custom of the Cyprians " to send their
virgins before marriage on fixed days to the shore,
to earn their dowry by prostitution, so as to pay a
first-offering to Venus for their virtue henceforth (pro
reliqua pudicitia libarnenta Veneri soluturas)." The
procession to the shore may indicate the rule that
intercourse was only allowed them with strangers, 4
and nothing points to prolonged prostitution. It is
probably the same rite that the Locrians of the West
vowed to perform in honour of Aphrodite in the event
1 De Dea Syr., 6 ; cf. Aug. De Civ. Dei, 4, 10 : " cui (Veneri) etiam
Phoenices doimm dabant de prostitutione filiarum, antequam eas jun-
gerent viris " : religious prostitution before marriage prevailed among
the Carthaginians in the worship of Astarte (Valer. Max., 2, ch. i, sub.
fin. : these vague statements may refer either to defloration of virgins
or prolonged service in the temple).
2 See Frazer, op. cit., p. 33, n. i, quoting Sozomen. Hist. Eccles.,
5, 10, 7 ; Sokrates, Hist. Eccles., i, 18, 7-9 ; Euseb. Vita Constantin., 3,
58. Eusebius only vaguely alludes to it. Sokrates merely says that
the wives were in common, and that the people had the habit of giving
over the virgins to strangers to violate. Sozomenos is the only
voucher for the religious aspect of the practice ; from Sokrates we
gather that the rule about strangers was observed in the rite.
9 18, 5-
* This is confirmed by the legend given by Apollodoros (Bibl., 3,
14, 3) that the daughters of Kinyras, owing to the wrath of Aphrodite,
had sexual intercourse with strangers.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 275
of deliverance from a dangerous war. 1 But in the
worship of Anaitis at Akilisene in Armenia, according
to Strabo, 2 the unmarried women served as temple-
harlots for an indefinite time until they married ; and
Aurelia Aemilia of Tralles may have been only main-
taining the same ancient ritual in Lydia. In these
two countries, then, it seems as if there had been a fusion
of two institutions that elsewhere were distinct one
from another, harlot-service for a prolonged period
in a temple, and the consecration of each maiden's
virginity as a preliminary to marriage.
Such institutions mark the sharpest antagonism
between the early religious sentiment of the East and
the West. Of no European State is there any record,
religious or other, that the sacrifice before marriage
of a woman's virginity to a mortal was at any time
regarded as demanded by temple ritual. Such a rite
was abhorrent to the genuine Hellenic, as it was to
the Hebraic, spirit ; and only in later times do we find
one or two Hellenic cult-centres catching the taint of
the Oriental tradition : while such legends as that
of Melanippos and Komaitho and the story of Laokoon's
sin express the feeling of horror which any sexual licence
in a temple aroused in the Greek, 3
1 Justin, 21, 3 ; Athenaeus, 516 A, speaks vaguely, as if the women
of the Lokri Epizephyrii were promiscuous prostitutes.
2 Pp. 532-533.
3 The lovers, Melanippos and Komaitho, sin in the temple of
Artemis Triklaria of the lonians in Achaia ; the whole community is
visited with the divine wrath, and the sinners are offered up as a
piacular sacrifice (Paus., 7, 19, 3) ; according to Euphorion, Laokoon's
fate was due to a similar trespass committed with his wife before the
statue of Apollo (Serv* A en., 2, 201). It may be that such legends
faintly reflect a very early tepte ydpos once performed in temples
by the priest and priestess : if so, they also express the repugnance
of the later Hellene to the idea of it ; and in any case this is not the
institution that is being discussed.
276 GREECE AND BABYLON
It is imperative to try to understand the original
purpose or significance of the Semitic and Anatolian
rites that we have been dealing with. To regard them
as the early Christian and some modern writers have
done, as mere examples of unbridled Oriental lust
masquerading in the guise of religion, is a false and
unjust view. According to Herodotus, the same society
that ordained this sacrifice of virginity upon the
daughters of families maintained in other respects a
high standard of virtue, which appears also attested
by Babylonian religious and secular documents. Modern
anthropology has handled the problem with greater
insight and seriousness ; but certain current explana-
tions are not convincing. To take the rite described
by Herodotus first, which is always to be distinguished
from the permanent institution of "hierodulai " in the
sense of temple-harlots : Mannhardt, who was the first
to apply modern science to the problem, explained it
as a development of vegetation-ritual. 1 Aphrodite and
Adonis, Ishtar and Tammuz, represent vegetation, and
their yearly union causes general fertility ; the women
are playing the part of the goddess, and the stranger
represents Adonis ! The Babylonian rite, then, is partly
religious piling, the human acting of a divine drama,
partly religious magic good for the crops. But in spite
of Mannhardt's great and real services to science, his
vegetation-theory leads him often astray, and only
one who was desperately defending a thesis would
explain that stranger, a necessary personage in the
ritual at Babylon, Byblos, Cyprus, and Baalbec,
as the native god. There is no kind of reason for
connecting the Babylonian rite with Tammuz, or
for supposing that the women were representing
1 Antike Wald u. FeU Kulte, p. 285, etc.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 277
the goddess, 1 or that their act directly influenced
the crops, except in the sense that all due perform-
ance of religious ceremonies has been considered at
certain stages of belief as favouring the prosperity
of the land. Sir William Ramsay, in his Cities and
Bishoprics of Phrygia* would explain the custom as
preserving the tradition of the communism of women
before regular marriage was instituted. Dr. Frazer,
who has dealt more fully with the question, accepts
this explanation, 3 as he also accepts Mannhardt's in
full ; and, while he associates as I think, wrongly the
Babylonian rite with general temple-prostitution, he
adds a third suggestion, prompted by his theory of
kingship : the king himself might have to mate with
one or more of the temple-harlots " who played Astarte
to his Adonis " : 4 such unions might serve to maintain
the supply of human deities, one of whom might succeed
to the throne, and another might be sacrificed in his
father's stead when religion demanded the life of the
royal man-god. I do not find this theory coherent
even with itself ; and, like the others, it fails to explain
all the facts, and, on the other hand, it imagines data
which are not given us by the records.
That state of communism when sexual union was
entirely promiscuous is receding further and further into
the anthropological background : it is dangerous to predi-
cate it of the most backward Anatolian State in any
period which can come into our ken. When the Byzantine
Sokrates gravely tells us that the men of Heliopolis
1 Why should not the priestess rather play the part of the goddess,
and why, if we trust Plutarch (Vit. Artaxevx., 27), was the priestess of
Anaitis at Ekbatana, to whose temple harlots were attached, obliged
to observe chastity after election ?
2 Vol. i. pp. 94-96.
8 Op. cit., p. 35, etc. 4 Op. cit., p. 44.
278 GREECE AND BABYLON
had their wives in common, he does not know what
he is saying. And if this sacrifice of virginity before
marriage was a recognition of the original rights of
all the males of the community, why did not some
representative of the community take the virginity,
the priest or some head-man? This ill-considered
sociologic hypothesis shipwrecks on that mysterious
stranger. 1
Prof. Westermarck, in his Origin and Development of
the Moral Ideas, 2 regards the Mylitta-rite as intended to
ensure fertility in women through direct appeal to the
goddess of fertility, and he explains the formula which
the stranger uttered ssr/fcaXiaj rot rqv 6ew Mfo/rra
as signifying generally " May the goddess Mylitta
prosper thee." Obviously the phrase, " I invoke the
goddess for thee/' could as naturally mean, " I claim
thee in the name of the goddess," the stranger basing
his right to the woman on this appeal. But his general
theory appears not so unsound as those which have just
been noted.
The comparative method ought to help us here ;
and though we have no exact parallel, as far as I am
aware, recorded of any people outside the Mediterranean
area to the Babylonian custom, we find usages reported
elsewhere that agree with it in one essential. Lubbock
quotes instances from modern India of the rule imposed
upon women of presenting themselves before marriage
in the temple of Juggernaut for the purpose as he
implies of offering up their virginity, though no such
custom is recorded in the Vedic period of religion ; 3
cases also are chronicled of the rule prevailing among
1 1 pointed out this objection in an article in the Avchiv. /. Relig.
Wissensch., 1904, p. 81 ; Mr. S. Hartland has .also, independently,
developed it (op. cit., p. 191).
2 Vol. ii. p. 446. 3 Origin of Civilisation, pp. 535-537.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 279
uncultured or semi-cultured tribes that the medicine-
man or the priest should take the virginity of the bride
before the marriage ceremony. 1 These are probably
illustrations of the working of the same idea as that
which inspired the Babylonian custom. Marriage in-
volves the entering upon a new state ; change of life
is generally dangerous, and must be safeguarded by
what Van Gennep has called " rites de passage " ;
more especially is the sexual union with a virgin
dangerous and liable to be regarded with awe by
primitive sentiment ; before it is safe to marry her,
the tabu that is upon her must first be removed by
a religious act securing the divinity's sanction for the
removal ; just as the ripe cornfield must not be reaped
before religious rites, such as the consecration of first-
fruits, have loosened the tabu upon it : we may believe
that Hellenic marriage ritual secured the same end as
the Babylonian by what seems to us the more innocent
method of offering the TporiXs/a. So the Babylonian
safeguards the coming marriage by offering the first-
fruits of his daughter to the goddess who presides over
the powers and processes of life and birth. Under her
protection, after appeal to her, the process loses its special
danger ; or if there is danger still, it falls upon the head
of the stranger. 2 For I can find no other way of account-
1 Vide Westermarck, History of Human Marriage, p. 76.
2 Mr. Hartland objects (loc. cit., p. 200) to this explanation on the
ground that the stranger would dislike the danger as much as any one
else ; but the rite may have arisen among a Semitic tribe who were
peculiarly sensitive to that feeling of peril, while they found that the
usual stranger was sceptical and more venturesome : when once the
rule was established, it could become a stereotyped convention. His
own suggestion (p. 201) that a stranger was alone privileged, lest the
solemn act should become a mere love-affair with a native lover, does
not seem to me so reasonable ; to prevent that, the act might as well
have been performed by a priest. Dr. Frazer in his new edition of
Adonis, etc. (pp. 50-54), criticises my explanation, which I first put
2'8o GREECE AND BABYLON
ing for his presence as a necessary agent, in the ritual
of at least four widely separate communities of Semitic
race : this comparative ubiquity prevents us explaining
it as due to some capricious accidental impulse of
delicacy, as if the act would become less indelicate if a
stranger who would not continue in the place participated
in it.
In his essay on the question, Mr. Hartland explains
the Babylonian rite as belonging to the class of puberty-
ceremonies ; nor would this account of it conflict with
the view here put forth, if, as he maintains, primitive
puberty-ceremonies to which girls are subjected are
usually preliminary to the marriage which speedily
follows. 1 But puberty-ceremonies are generally per-
formed at initiation-mysteries, and none of the rites
that we are considering appear to have been associated
with mysteries except, perhaps, at Cyprus, where the
late record speaks of mysteries instituted by Kinyras
that had a sexual significance, and which may have been
the occasion of the consecration of virginity that Justin
describes ; 2 but the institution of mysteries has not
forth but with insufficient clearness in t~h.QArcMv.fur Religionswissen-
schaft (1904, p. 88), mainly on the ground that^it does not naturally
apply to general temple-prostitution nor to the prostitution of married
women. But it was never meant to apply to these, but only to the
defloration of virgins before marriage. Dr. Frazer also argues that
the account of Herodotus does not show that the Babylonian rite was
limited to virgins. Explicitly it does not, but implicitly it does ; for
Herodotus declares that it was an isolated act, and therefore to be
distinguished from temple-prostitution of indefinite duration ; and he
adds that the same rite was performed in Cyprus, which, as the other
record clearly attests, was the defloration of virgins by strangers.
Sozomenos and Sokrates attest the same of the Baalbec rite, and
Eusebius's vague words are not sufficient to contradict them. One rite
might easily pass into the other ; but our theories as to the original
meaning of different rites should observe the difference.
1 But vide Gennep, Les Rites de passage, p. 100.
2 Cf. Arnob. Adv. Gent., 5, 19, with Finnic. Matern. De Error., 10,
and Clemens, Protrept., c. 2, p, 12, Pott.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 281
yet been proved for any purely Semitic religion. In any
case, Mr. Hartland's statement does not explain why
the loss of virginity should be considered desirable in
a puberty-ceremony or as a preliminary to marriage.
The significance of the action, as I have interpreted it,
is negative rather than positive, the avoidance of a
vague peril or the removal of a tabu rather than the
attainment of the blessing of fertility, as Dr. Wester-
mar ck would regard it. And this idea, the removal of a
tabu, seems expressed in the phrase of Herodotus * by
which he describes the state of the woman after the
ceremony &vroffiuffK(*ewi r% 6t ; and the parallel
that I have suggested, the consecration of the first-
fruits of the harvest to remove the tabu from the
rest of the crop, is somewhat justified by the words of
Justin already quoted " pro reliqua pudicitia libamenta
Veneri soluturas."
As regards the other institution, the maintenance of
" hierodoulai " in temples as " consecrated " women,
" kadeschim/' unmarried, who for a period of years
indulged in sexual intercourse with visitors, the original
intention and significance of it is hard to decide. We may
be sure that it did not originate in mere profligacy, and
the inscription of Tralles shows that even in the later
Roman period it had not lost its religious prestige. 2
Such a custom could naturally arise in a society that
allowed freedom of sexual intercourse among young
unmarried persons and this is not uncommonly found
at a primitive level of culture and that was devoted
to the worship of a goddess of sexual fertility. The
rituals in the temples of Ishtar of Erech, Anaitis of
1 1, 199-
2 The lady who there boasts of her prostitute-ancestresses describes
them also as " of unwashed feet " ; and this is a point of asceticism
and holiness.
28s GREECE AND BABYLON -
Armenia, Ma of Comana, must have been instituted
for some national and social purpose ; therefore Mr.
Hartland's suggestion, that the original object of the
Armenian rite was to give the maidens a chance of
securing themselves a suitable husband by experience,
seems insufficient. Dr. Frazer's theory, that connects
the institution with some of the mystic purposes of king-
ship, 1 floats in the air ; for there is not a particle of
evidence showing any relation between these women
and the monarch or the royal harem or the monarch-
ical succession or the death of a royal victim. A
simpler suggestion is that the " hierodoulai," or temple-
women, were the human vehicles for diffusing through
the community the peculiar virtue or potency of the
goddess, the much-coveted blessing of human fertility.
Thus to consecrate slaves or even daughters to this
service was a pious social act.
The significance of the facts that we have been
examining is of the highest for the history of religious
morality, especially for the varied history of the idea
of purity. We call this temple-harlotry vile and impure ;
the civilised Babylonian, who in private life valued
purity and morality, called the women " kadistu,"
that is, " pure " or clean in the ritualistic sense, or as
Zimmern interprets the ideogram, " not unclean." 2
In fact, the Mediterranean old-world religions, all save
the Hebraic, agreed in regarding the processes of the
propagation of life as divine, at least as something not
alien or abhorrent to godhead. But the early Christian
propagandists, working here on Hebraic lines, intensified
the isolation of God from the simple phenomena of
birth, thereby engendering at times an anti-sexual bias,
and preparing a discord between any possible biological
1 Op. cit., p. 199. 2 K.A.T*, p. 423.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 283
view and the current religious dogma, and modern
ethical thought has not been wholly a gainer thereby.
The subject that has been discussed at some length
is also connected with the whole question of ritual-purity
and purification. The primitive conception of purity had
at an early stage in its evolution been adopted by higher
religion ; and the essential effect of impurity was to debar
a person from intercourse with God and with his fellow-
men. Hence arises a code of rules to regulate temple-
ritual. So far as I am aware, the Babylonian rules for
safeguarding the purity of the shrines were not con-
spicuously different from the Greek or the Hebraic. 1
The taint of bloodshed and other physical impurities
was kept aloof ; and it is in the highest degree probable
that the function of the " hetairai " was only performed
outside the temple, for Herodotus specially tells us
that this rule was observed in the Myiitta-rite. The
cathartic methods of East and West agree in many
points. The use of holy water for purifying purposes
was known to the early Greeks. 2 It was still more in
evidence in the Babylonian ritual : the holy water of
the Euphrates or Tigris was used for a variety of purposes,
for the washing of the king's hands before he touched
the statues, for the washing of the idol's mouths, 3
1 Vide supra, p. 163. The writer of the late apocryphal document,
** The Epistle of Jeremy," makes it a reproach to the Babylonian cult
that " women set meat before the gods " (v. 30), and " the menstruous
woman and the woman in child-bed touch their sacrifices " (v, 29),
meaning, perhaps, that there was nothing to prevent the Babylonian
priestess being in that condition. But we cannot trust him for exact
knowledge of these matters. Being a Jew, he objects to the ministra-
tion of women. The Babylonian and Hellene were wiser, and admitted
them to the higher functions of religion.
2 Vide Cults , iv. p. 301.
3 Vide Inscription of Sippar in British Museum, concerning the
re-establishment of cult of Shamash by King Nabupaladdin, 884-
860 B.C. (Jeremias, Die Cultus-Tafel von Sippar).
284 GREECE AND BABYLON
perhaps also for baptism. For we hear of some such
rite in a hymn to Enlil translated by Dr. Langdon I the
line that he renders " Son whom in the sacred bowl she
baptized/' seems to refer to a human child. Ablution
was prominent also in the exorcism-ritual, and the
" House of Washing " or " House of Baptism " was the
centre of a liturgy that had for its object deliverance from
demons. 2 The whole State was at times purified by
water. 3 And in all this ritual the water must itself
be of a peculiar purity rain-water, for instance, 4 or
the water of the Euphrates, whence came probably
the Water of Life that was kept in Marduk's temple
with which the Gods and the Annunaki washed their
faces, and which was used in the feast of the Doom-
fixing. 5 According to the Babylonian view ordinary
water was naturally impure (we may well believe that
it was so at Babylon, where the river and canals were
so pressed into the service of man), and a person
incurred impurity by stepping over a puddle or other
unpurified water. 6 The Greek did not need to be so
scrupulous, for most water in his land was naturally
pure, being spring or brook ; yet in his cathartic rules
we find often that only a special water was suitable
for the religious purpose, running water especially,
or sea-water, or in a particular locality one sacred
fountain only. 7 But though it was to him as to most
1 Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, p. 75.
2 Vide Langdon in Transactions of Congress for the History of
Religions (1908), vol. i. p. 250.
8 Vide Zeitung fur Assyriologie, 1910, p. 157.
4 Formula for driving out the demon of sickness, " Bread at his
head place, rain-water at his feet place " (Langdon, ib. p. 252).
5 Delitsch, Worterbuch, i. 79-80.
6 Zeit. fur Assyr., 1910, p. 157.
7 Vide Hippocrates (Littre), vi. 362 ; Stengel, Griechischer Kultus-
altertumer (Iwan Muller's Handbuch, p, no).
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 285
peoples, the simple and natural means of purification,
he did not apply it to such various cathartic purposes
as the Babylonian. Nor as far as we can discover had
he developed in old days the interesting rite of baptism :
we hear of it first in the records of the fifth century, and
in relation to alien cults like that of the Thracian goddess
Kotytto. 1
Equally prominent in the cathartic ritual of Meso-
potamia was the element of fire : in the prayer that
followed upon the purification-ceremonies we find the
formula, " May the torch of the gleaming Fire-God cleanse
me." 2 The Fire-God, Nusku, is implored " to burn
away the evil magicians/' 3 and we may believe that
he owes his development and exalted position as a high
spiritual god to the ritual use of fire, just as in the Vedic
religion did Agni. The conception of fire as a mighty
purifying element, which appears in the Old and New
Testaments and in Christian eschatology, has arisen, no
doubt, from the cathartic ritual of the ancient Semites.
Doubtless also the spiritual or magic potency of this
element was known in ancient Europe : it is clearly
revealed in the primitive ceremonies of the old German
" Notfeuer," with which the cattle, fields, and men were
purified in time of pestilence. 4 And there are several
indications of its use in Greek cathartic ritual ; a note-
worthy example is the purification of Lemnos by the
bringing of holy fire from Delos ; 5 the curious Attic
ritual of running with the new-born babe round the
1 Referred to in the comedy of Eupolis called the " Baptai."
2 Jastrow, op. cit., p. 500.
3 Op. cit. t p. 297, 487; the priest-exorciser, the Ashipu, uses a
brazier in the expulsion of demons.
4 Vide Golther, Handbuch der Gevmanischen Mythologie, p. 580 ;
cf . my Cults, v. p. 196.
5 Cults, vol. v. pp. 383-384 ; cf. iv. p. 301.
286 GREECE AND BABYLON
hearth, called the Amphidromia, may have had a similar
intention ; l even the holy water, the %gpv/%//, seems to
have been hallowed by the insertion of a torch ; 2 and
in the later records fire is often mentioned among the
usual implements of cleansing. 3 The Eleusinian myth
concerning Demeter holding the infant Demophon in
the flame to make him immortal was suggested probably
by some purificatory rite in which fire was used. Finally,
the fire-ordeal, which was practised both in Babylonia
and Greece, 4 may have been associated at a certain
period with the cathartic properties of fire. Neverthe-
less, the Hellenic divinities specially concerned with this
element, Hestia and Hephaistos, had little personal
interest in this ritual, and did not rise to the same
height in the national theology as Nusku rose in the
Babylonian.
We might find other coincidences in detail between
Hellenic and Assyrian ritual, such as the purificatory
employment of salt, onions, and the sacrificial skin of
the animal-victim. 5 One of the most interesting phen-
omena presented by the cathartic law of old Babylonia
1 Cults, v. p. 356 ; cf. p. 363 (the purifying animal carried round
the hearth).
3 Eur. Here, Fur., 928.
3 Dio Chrys. Or., 48 (Dind., vol. ii. p. 144), TrepimQtfpavTes TTJV ir6\iv /*?/
ffKlXKy [jL^k 80,81, TroXi) S KadapcaTfyip xp-^art r \6yq> (cf. Lucian, Menipp,,
c. 7, use of squills and torches in "katharsis," (?) Babylonian or
Hellenic) ; Serv. ad Aen., 6, 741, "in sacris omnibus tres sunt istae
purgationes, nam aut taeda purgant aut sulphure aut aqua abluunt
aut aere ventilant."
4 " To take fire and swear by God " is a formula that occurs in
the third tablet of Surpu ; vide Zimmern, Beitrage zuv Kenntniss BabyL
Relig., p. 13 ; cf. Soph. Antig., 264.
5 Salt used as a means of exorcism in Babylonia as early as the
third millennium (vide Langdon, Transactions of Congress Hist. Relig.,
1908, vol. i. p. 251) ; the fell " of the great ox " used to purify the
palace of the king (vide Zimmern, Beitrage, p. 123 ; compare the Aids
xtpfaov in Greek ritual).
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 287
is a rule that possessed an obvious moral value ; we
find, namely, on one of the cylinders of Gudea, that
during the period when Gudea was purifying the city
the master must not strike the slave, and no action at
law must be brought against any one ; for seven days
perfect equality reigned, no bad word was uttered, the
widow and the Orphan went free from wrong. 1 The
conception underlying this rule is intelligible : all
quarrelling and oppression, being often accompanied
with bloodshed and death, disturbs the general purity
which is desired to prevail ; and I have indicated else-
where a similar law regulating the conduct of the
Eleusinian mysteries and the Dionysiac festival at
Athens, both ceremonies of cathartic value, 2 and I
have pointed out a similar ordinance observed recently
by a North-American Indian tribe, and formerly by
the Peruvians ; to these instances may be added the
statement by Livy, 3 that in the Roman " lectisternia,"
when a table with offerings was laid before the gods,
no quarrelling was allowed and prisoners were released,
and the historian gives to the institution of the lectis-
ternia a piacular significance.
We must also bear in mind certain striking differences
between the Hellenic and the Babylonian cathartic
systems. In certain purification-ceremonies of Hellas,
those in which the homicide was purged from his stain,
the washing with the blood of the piacular victim was
the most potent means of grace. 4 We may find analogies
in Vedic, Roman, and Hebraic ritual, but hitherto
none have been presented by the religious documents
1 Vide Tlrureau-Dangin, Cylindres de Goudea, pp. 29, 93.
2 Vide Evolution of Religion, pp. 113, 114, 117 ; Cults, v. p. 322
(Schol. Demosth., 22, p. 68).
3 5, 13. 6.
4 Vide Cults, iii. pp. 303-304 ; Evolution of Religion, p. 121.
288 GREECE AND BABYLON
of Babylon, where, as has been already pointed out,
scarcely any mystic use appears to have been made of
the blood of the victim. 1 Again, the Babylonian purifica-
tion included the confession of sins, a purgation unknown
and apparently unnatural to the Hellene ; 2 and generally
the Babylonian, while most of its methods, like the
Hellenic, are modes of transference or physical riddance
of impurity, had a higher spiritual and religious signifi-
cance ; for it includes lamentations for sin and prayers
to the divinity that are not mentioned in the record of
any Greek " katharsis."
A long ritual-document is preserved containing the
details of the purification of the king : 3 certain forms
agree with the Hellenic, but one who was only versed
in the latter would find much that was strange and
unintelligible both in the particulars and in general
atmosphere. We discern an interesting mixture of
magic and religion. The gods are partly entreated,
partly bribed, partly constrained ; and at the end the
evil is physically expelled from the palace. The purifier
puts on dark garments, just as the ministers of the
underworld-deities did occasionally in Greece. The
king himself performs much of the ceremony, and utters
words of power : " May my sins be rent away, may I
be pure and live before Shamash." The ordering of
the cathartic apparatus is guided partly by astrology.
It is curious also to find that every article used in the
process is identified by name with some divinity : the
cypress is the god Adad, the fragrant spices the god
Ninib, the censer the god Ib, etc. ; and the commentary
that accompanies the ritual-text explains that these
1 Vide supra, p. 146.
2 Vide Cults, iii. p. 167.
3 Published in Zimmern's Beitrage, p. 123 ; cf. Weber, Damomn-
beschwdvung, pp. 17-19.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 289
substances compel the deities thus associated with them
to come and give aid.
In fact, the differences between East and West
in this religious sphere are so important that we should
not be able to believe that the cathartic system of
Greece was borrowed from Babylonia, even if the points
of resemblance were much more numerous and striking
than they are. For it would be possible to draw up
a striking list of coincidences between Hellenic and
Vedic cathartic rites, and yet no one would be able on
the strength of it to establish a hypothesis of borrowing.
In any case, it may be said, the question of borrowing
does not arise within the narrow limits of our inquiry,
which is limited to the pre-Homeric period, since all
Greek " katharsis " is post-Homeric. The latter dictum
is obviously not literally true, as a glance through the
Homeric poems will prove. Homer is aware of the
necessity of purification by water before making prayer
or libation to the gods : Achilles washes his hands and
the cups before he pours forth wine and prays to Zeus, 1
Telemachos washes his hands in sea-water before he
prays to Athena 2 ; and there is a significant account
of the purification of the whole Achaean host after the
plague ; 3 as the later Greeks would have done, the
Achaeans throw away into the sea their Xvparu, the
infected implements of purification, wool or whatever
they used, that absorbed the evil from them. But it
has been generally observed that Homer does not
appear to have been aware of any need for purification
from the stain of bloodshed or from the ghostly contagion
of death. It is true that Odysseus purifies his hall with
fire and sulphur after slaying the suitors, but we are
not sure that the act had any further significance than
1 II,, xvi. 228. 2 Od.> ii. 261, * II., i. 313.
I 9
290 GREECE AND BABYLON
the riddance of the smell of blood from the house.
Sulphur is there called KOMM &%og, 1 " a remedy against
evil things " ; but we cannot attach any moral or
spiritual sense to %a%d, nor is Homeric *a0apor/$ re-
lated, as far as we can see, to any animistic belief.
There is one passage where Homer's silence is valuable
and gives positive evidence ; Theoklumenos, who has
slain a man of his own tribe and fled from his home,
in consequence approaches Telemachos when the latter
is sacrificing and implores and receives his protection :
there is no hint of any feeling that there is a stain upon
him, or that he needs purification, or that his presence
pollutes the sacrifice. 2 All this would have been felt
by the later Greek ; and in the post-Homeric period
we have to reckon with a momentous growth of the
idea of impurity and of a complex system of purifica-
tion, especially in regard to homicide, leading to im-
portant developments in the sphere of law and morality
which I have tried to trace out on other occasions. 3
But Homer may well be regarded as the spokesman of
a gifted race, the Achaeans, as we call them, on whom
the burden of the doctrine of purification lay lightly,
and for whom the ghostly world had comparatively
little terror or interest. Besides the Achaeans, however,
and their kindred races there was the submerged popula-
tion of the older culture who enter into the composition
of the various Hellenes of history. Therefore the varied
development in the post-Homeric period of cathartic
ideas may be only a renaissance, a recrudescence of
forces that were active enough in the second millennium.
1 Od., xxii. 481 : In the passage referred to above, Achilles uses
sulphur to purify the cups.
2 Od., xiii. 256-281 : This is rightly pointed out by Stengel in his
Griechiscbe Kultusaltertumer, p. 107.
3 Evolution of Religion, pp. 139-152 ; Cults, iv. pp. 295-306.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 291
Attica may have been the home where the old tradi-
tion survived, and cathartic rites such as the Thargelia
and the trial of the axe for murder in the Bouphonia
have the savour of great antiquity. May not the
Minoan religion of Crete have been permeated with
the ideas of the impurity of bloodshed and the craving
for purification from sin ? For at the beginning of the
historic period Crete seems to have been the centre
of what may be called the cathartic mission ; from
this island came Apollo Delphinios, the divine purifier
par excellence, to this island the god came to be purified
from the death of Python ; and in later times, Crete
lent to Athens its purifying prophet Epiinenides. 1 If we
believe, then, that the post-Homeric blood-purification
was really a recrudescence of the tradition of an older
indigenous culture, we should use this as another argu-
ment for the view that the Greece of the second mil-
lennium was untouched or scarcely touched by Baby-
lonian influence. For, as we have seen, purification by
blood or from blood appears to have been wholly alien
to Babylonian religious and legal practice.
The ritual of purification belongs as much to the
history of magic as religion. Now, the student of
religion is not permitted to refuse to- touch the domain
of magic ; nor can we exclude its consideration even
from the highest topics of religious speculation. Some
general remarks have already been made 2 concerning
the part played by magic both in the worship and in the
1 Vide Cults, iv. pp. 144-147, 300 : To suppose that Hellas learnt
its cathartic rites from Lydia, because Herodotus (i. 35) tells us that
in his time the Lydians had the Hellenic system of purification from
homicide, is less natural. Lydia may well have learnt it from Delphi
in the time of Alyattes or Croesus. Or it may have survived in
Lydia as a tradition of the early " Minoan " period ; and, similarly, it
may have survived in Crete.
2 Vide supra, pp. 176-178.
292 GREECE AND BABYLON
social life of the peoples that we are comparing. Any
exact and detailed comparison would be fruitless for our
present purpose ; for, while the knowledge of early
Babylonian magic is beginning to be considerable, we
cannot say that we know anything definite concerning
the practices in this department of the Hellenic and
adjacent peoples in the early period with which we are
dealing. From the Homeric poems we can gather
little more than that magic of some kind existed ; and
that Homer and his gifted audience probably despised
it as they despised ghosts and demons. It is only by
inference that we can venture to ascribe to the earliest
period of the Greek race some of the magic rites that are
recorded by the later writers. It would require a
lengthy investigation and treatise to range through the
whole of Greek ritual and to disentangle and expose the
magic element which was undoubtedly there, and which
in some measure is latent in the ritual of every higher
religion yet examined. By way of salient illustration
we may quote the ceremonies of the scapegoat and the
<pap/jtiaz6$ f l modes of the magic-transference of sin and evil ;
the strewing of sacred food-stuff that is instinct with
divine potency over the fields in the Thesmophoria ;
the rain magic performed by the priests of Zeus
Lykaios ; 2 we hear at Kleonai of an official class of
" Magi " who controlled the wind and the weather by
spells, and occasionally in their excitement gashed their
own hands, like the priests of Baal; 3 such blood-
magic being explicable as a violent mode of discharging
personal energy upon the outer objects which one
wishes to subdue to one's will. Another and more
1 Vide Cults, iv. pp. 268-284.
* For similar practices, vide Cults, pp. 415-417,
* Clem. AJex. Strom., p. 755, Pott.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 293
thrilling example of blood-magic is the process of water-
finding by pouring human blood about the earth, a
method revealed by an old legend of Haliartos in
Boeotia about the man who desired water, and in order
to find it consulted Delphi, and was recommended by
the oracle to slay the first person who met him on his
return ; his own young son met him first, and the father
stabbed him with his sword ; the wounded youth ran
round about, and wherever the blood dripped water
sprang up from the earth. 1 No one will now venture to
say that all these things are post-Homeric ; the natural
view is that they were an inheritance of crude andprimitive
thought indigenous to the land. Many of them belong
to world-wide custom ; on the other hand, some of the
striking and specialised rites, such as the blood-magic
and the ritual of the tpuppaxos, are not found at Babylon.
But before prejudging the question, some salient
and peculiar developments of Babylonian magic ought
to be considered. One great achievement of Meso-
potamian civilisation was the early development of
astrology, to which perhaps the whole world has
been indebted for good and for evil, and which was
associated with magic and put to magic uses. Astro-
logical observation led to the attachment of a magic
value to numbers and to certain special numbers, such as
number seven. Whether the Judaic name and institution
of the Sabbath is of Babylonian origin or not, does not
concern our question. But it concerns us to know that
the seventh days, the I4th, the 2ist, and 28th of
certain months, if not of all, were sacred at Babylon, and
were days of penance and piacular duties when ordinary
occupation was suspended. 2 We can discern the origin
of the sanctity of this number : the observation of the
1 Pans., 9, 33, 4. 2 For the facts vide Zimmern, K.A.T.*, p. 592.
294 GREECE AND BABYLON
seven planets, and the division of the lunar month into
four quarters of seven days. The early Greeks, doubt-
less, had their astrological superstitions, as most races
have had ; the new moon is naturally lucky, the waning
moon unlucky ; but no one can discover any numerical
or other principle in the Hesiodic system, which is our
earliest evidence of Hellenic lucky and unlucky days.
His scheme is presented in naive confusion, and he con-
cludes humorously, " one man praises one day, one
another, and few know anything about it." x His page
of verse reflects the anarchy of the Greek calendars ; and
we should find it hard to credit that either Hesiod or the
legislators that drew up those had sat attentively at
the feet of Babylonian teachers. But a few coincidences
may be noted. Hesiod puts a special tabu on the
fifth day of the month ; in fact, it is the only one in his
list that is wholly unlucky, a day when it would seem
to be best to do nothing at all, at least outside the house,
for on this day the Erinyes are wandering about. 2
Now, a Babylonian text published by Dr. Langdon con-
tains the dogma that on the fifth day of Nisan " he who
fears Marduk and Zarpanit shall not go out to work." 3
This Babylonian rule is the earliest example of what
may be strictly called Sabbatarianism, abstinence from
work through fear of offending the high god. Such
would probably not be the true account of Hellenic
feeling concerning the " forbidden days," which were
called avotppdfcg or ^/apa/. 4 The high god had issued
to the Hellene no moral commandment about " keeping
the Sabbath-day holy " ; his reluctance to do certain
work on certain days rested on a more primitive senti-
1 Works and Days, 1. 824. 2 Ib., I. 804.
3 Expositor, 1909, p. 156.
4 Vide Photius and Hesych., s.v. Mta/wl T
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 295
ment concerning them. Thus it was unlucky both for
himself and the city that Alcibiades should return to the
Piraeus when the Plynteria were going on ; for this
latter was a cathartic ceremony, and evil influences were
abroad. Nor, as Xenophon declares, would any one
venture to engage in a serious work on this day. 1 Nor were
these fiiotput yftepw, like the seventh days of the Babylonian
months, necessarily days of gloom when offended deities
had to be propitiated ; on the contrary, the day of Xos
was a day of merry drinking and yet (tiupu : in fact,
we best understand the latter phrase by translating it
" tabooed/' rather than " sad " or " gloomy." 2
Another coincidence that may arrest attention is
that in Hesiod's scheme the seventh day of the month
was sacred because Apollo was born on it ; and through-
out the later period this god maintains his connection
with the seventh day, also apparently with the first,
the fourteenth, and the twentieth of the month. 3 This
almost coincides with the Sabbatical division of the
Babylonian months. But we cannot suppose that in
Hellas these were days of mortification as they were in
the East ; else they would not have been associated with
the bright deity Apollo.
Such dubious coincidences, balanced by still more
striking diversities, are but frail supports for the hypo-
thesis of race-contact.
In Babylonian thaumaturgy nothing is more signifi-
cant than the magic power of the Word, whether spoken
or written : and the Word, as we have noted, was raised
to a cosmic divine power and possessed inherent creative
force. 4 This is only a reflection upon the heavens of
the human use of the magical or mesmeric word or set
1 Hell., i, 4, 12. 2 Vide Cults, v. pp. 215-216.
3 Cults, iv. p. 259. 4 Vide supra, pp. 176-177.
296 GREECE AND BABYLON
of words. This use of them is found, indeed, all round
the globe. What seems unique in the Mesopotamian
culture is that religion, religious literature, and poetry
should have reached so high a pitch and yet never have
risen above or shaken off the magic which is its constant
accompaniment. Men and gods equally use magic
against the demons ; the most fervid hymn of praise,
the most pathetic litany, is only part of an exorcism-
ritual ; and so inevitably does the shadow of magic
dog religion here that Dr. Langdon is justified in his
conjecture 1 that in a great hymn to Enlil, which contains
scarcely a prayer but chiefly ecstatic description of his
power, the worshipper is really endeavouring to charge
himself with higher religious magic by this outpouring.
In fact, here and elsewhere, a magic origin for the
practice of theologic exegesis may be obscurely traced ;
narrative might acquire an apotropaeic effect ; thus
tablets containing the narrative of the achievements
of the plague-god, hung up before the houses, could
avert pestilence, 2 or, again, the reading aloud the tablet
narrating the victory of Shamash and Ramman over the
seven demons who attacked the moon-god Sin served
to defeat the seven demons by the same sympathetic
magic as would be worked by a dramatic representation
of that event. 3
There is no record or hint that the Hellenes recited
hymns to Demeter or wrote up passages of Homer to
avert demons.
It belongs to the magic use of formulae that minute
exactness in respect of every syllable is necessary to the
power of the spell or the spell-prayer. An Assyrian
1 Sumeyian and Babylonian Psalms t p. 196.
2 King, Babylonian Religion, p. 196.
3 Vide Fossey, La Magie Assyrienne, p. 96.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 297
king who is consulting the sun-god concerning success
in a war with which he is threatened, prays that the
ritual which the enemy may be employing may go wrong
and fail ; and in this context occurs the curious petition,
" May the lips of the priest's son hurry and stumble
over a word/' 1 The idea seems to be that a single
slip in the ritual-formulae destroyed their whole value ;
and such a view belongs to magic rather than to religion.
Now it is probable that in his earliest mental stage
the Hellene had been in bondage to the religious magic
of sacred formulae and sacred names; and as a tradi-
tion of that stage, the divine epithet whereby he appealed
to his deities according to his needs retained always for
him a mysterious potency ; but otherwise we have no
proof that he worked word-magic by means of his sacred
texts.
Babylonian sorcery, whether legitimate or illegiti-
mate, was intended to work upon or through demons ;
and its familiarity with the names and special qualities
of demons is its peculiar mark. In the ritual of exorcism
of the demons, idols play a prominent and often singular
rdle. The following performance is probably unique :
in the exorcism of disease two idols, male and female,
were set up before the sick man, then the evil spirits of
sickness are invited thus : (t Oh ye all wicked, all evil,
who pursue so-and-so, if thou art male, here is thy
wife ; if thou art female, here is thy husband/' 2 The
intent of the exerciser seems to be to attract the demon
of disease, of whose sex he is not sure, into one or the
other of these images, and he lures it by amorous
enticement into the figure of opposite sex to its own ;
1 Knudtzon, Assyrische Gebete an den Sonnengott, p. 78 (texts belong-
ing to period of Asarhaddon, civc. 68 1).
2 Ziminern, Beitrage, etc., p. 161.
298 GREECE AND BABYLON
having got the demon into the image, he doubtless
takes it out and burns or buries it. Or the evil spirit
may be attracted from the patient by means of its own
image placed near him. One document prescribes
various images of bestial form, all of which are to be
taken by night to the bank of the river, probably that
they may be thrown in and carry the impurity of sickness
away. 1 Another shows us how to deal with Labartu,
the daughter of Anu ; 2 her image, made of clay, is placed
above the head of the sick man, so as to draw her or her
power out from him ; it is then taken out, slain, and
buried. And this exorcism is all the more notable
because Labartu is rather an evil goddess than a mere
demon, being styled in another text " August lady/'
" Mistress of the dark-haired men." 3 Such magical
drama, in which the demon-image might be slain to
annul its potency, seems characteristically Babylonian :
it entered also into the ritual of the high gods. For,
at the feast of the New Year, when Nebo arrived from
Borsippa, two images are brought before him and in
his presence decapitated with the sword. Dr. Langdon
interprets them 4 as representing probably "the demons
who aided the dragon in her fight with Marduk ; they
are the captive gods of darkness which ends with the
Equinox/* This is dramatic magic helpful to the
gods.
The elaboration of exorcism must have led to a
minuter articulation of the demon-world ; the exerciser
is most anxious to know and discover all about his
unseen foes : he gives them a name, a sex if possible,
and a number : he says of the powerful storm-demons
1 Zimmern, Beitrdge, etc., p. 163.
2 Fossey, op. cit., p. 399,
3 iv. R. 56, 12 ; Fossey, op. cit., p. 401.
4 Expositor, 1909, p. 150, giving text from iv. R. 40.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 299
Utuk " they are seven, they are seven, they are neither
male nor female, they take no wife and beget no
children ; " l for knowledge of the name or nature of the
personality gives magic power.
Many of these examples, which might easily be
multiplied, show us magic applied to private but bene-
ficent purposes, the healing of disease, the exorcism
of spirits of moral and physical evil. It was also in
vogue for national purposes for instance, for the destruc-
tion of the enemies of the king ; one of our documents
describes such a process as the making of a tallow-
image of the enemy of the king and binding his face
with a cord, so as to render the living foe impotent of
will and speech. 2
We have already noticed that the Babylonian
gods themselves work magic, and that it was also worked
on behalf of the gods. 3 And in the ritual-records much
that might be interpreted as religion may find its truer
account from the other point of view ; for instance,
the ritual of placing by the bedside of a sick man the
image of Nergal or those of the " twins who overthrow
the wicked Gallu " 4 might appear at first sight as a
religious appeal to the deities to come to his aid ; but
as in form it is exactly similar to the use made on the
same occasion, as noted above, of the images of demons,
we may rather suppose that the intention was magical
in this act also, and that the divine idols were supposed
to combat the demon of sickness by their magical
influence. Or, again, in part of the ritual of exorcism
we find acts that bear the semblance of sacrifice, such
as throwing onions and dates into the fire ; but they
were charged with a curse before thrown, and the act
1 Fossey, op. cit., p. 209. 2 Zimmern, Beitrdge, p. 173.
3 Supra, p. 176. 4 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 169.
300 GREECE AND BABYLON
is more naturally interpreted as a magic transference
of evil. 1
For the purpose of the exorcism, to deliver a "banned"
person, the high god, Marduk or another, might be
called in ; but Marduk also works the effect by magic :
a rope is woven by Ishtar's maidens, which Marduk
(or his priest) turns round the head of the sufferer,
then breaks it through and throws it out into the desert. 2
This looks like symbolic magic ; the knotted rope
represents the ban, which is then broken and thrown
away.
There are many features in these methods of exor-
cism, such as the apotropaeic use of idols, that are
common to other peoples at a certain stage of cul-
ture ; there remains much also that seems peculiar to
Babylon.
But what is uniquely characteristic of this Meso-
potamian people, and at the same time most un-Hellenic,
is the all-pervading atmosphere of magic, which colours
their view of life and their theory of the visible and
invisible world. Babylonia, at least, was the one salient
exception to the historic induction that a distinguished
writer 3 has recently sanctioned "religion once firmly
established invariably seeks to exclude magic ; and
the priest does his best to discredit the magician.' 1
The psalmody of Babylon, with its occasional outbursts
1 Zimmern, Beitrdge, pp. 30-31 ; he mentions also the similar
practice of tying up a sheepskin or a fillet of wool and throwing it into
the fire.
2 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 33 : note magic use of knots in general, vide
Frazer, G.B. 2 , vol. i. pp. 392-403 ; Archiv. fur Religionsw., 1908, pp. 128,
383, 405. The superstition may have prevailed in Minoan Crete (see
A. Evans, Annual Byitish School, 1902-1903, pp. 7-9) and was in
vogue in ancient Greece.
a w. Warde Fowler, The Religious Experiences of the Roman People,
Gifford Lectures, p. 49.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 301
of inspiration and its gleams of spiritual insight, would
have appealed to an Isaiah; its magic would have
appealed to many a modern African. The Babylonian
prophet does not frown on it ; the high gods accept
it, the priest is its skilled and beneficent practitioner.
And at no other point, perhaps, is the contrast between
the Hellenic and the Mesopotamian religions so glaring
as at this.
This comparison of Eastern and Western ritual may
close with some observations on another religious function
that may be of some value for the question of early ethnic
influence.
It has been remarked that divination played an
important, perhaps a dominant part in the Babylonian
ritual of sacrifice, divination, that is, by inspection of
the victim's entrails, especially the liver ; and that
this method was adopted in Greece only in the later
centuries. 1 But there are other salient differences be-
tween the Babylonian and the more ancient mantic art
of Hellas. 2 Another method much in vogue in the
former was a curious mode of divining by mixing oil
and water and watching the movements and behaviour
of the two liquids. 3 The first and only indication of
a similar practice in Hellas is a passage in the Agamem-
non of ^Eschylus, of which the true meaning has hitherto
escaped the interpreters. 4 And here, as usual, an
obvious example of Mesopotamian influence on Hellenic
custom belongs only to a late epoch. It is also true
1 Vide supra, pp. 248-249; Cults, iv. p. 191.
2 For the main facts relating to the Babylonian system and the
" baru "-priests, vide Zimmern, Beitvage, etc., pp. 82-92; for the
Hellenic, vide Cults, iv. 190-192, 224-231 ; also vol. iii 9-12.
3 The documentary evidence, from a very early period, is given
by Zimmern, Beitydge, etc., pp. 85-97.
* L. 322 : Clytemnestra speaks of pouring oil and vinegar into the
same vessel and reproaching them for their unsociable behaviour.
302 GREECE AND BABYLON
that the ancient divination of the two peoples agreed
in certain respects, namely, in that both used, like most
communities at a certain stage of culture, the auguries
of birds and the revelations of dreams. As regards the
facts relating to the former, we know more about Greece
than at present about Babylon. But in the matter of
dream-oracles, it is manifest that the Hellenic phenomena
are entirely independent of Mesopotamian fashion. The
Assyrian and Babylonian documents reveal the fashion
of dream-prophecy in its simplest and highest form :
the high deity of his own pleasure sends a dream, and
the divining priest or skilled interpreter interprets it.
No hint has so far been detected of that artificial method
of provoking prophetic dreams by " incubation " or
lyxoipwtg, the fashion of laying oneself down in some
sacred shrine and sleeping with one's ear to the ground,
that was much in vogue in ancient Hellas and still
survives in parts of the modern Greek world and which
may be regarded as an immemorial tradition. In this
divination, the divine spokesman was the power of
the underworld. And this was the most important
difference between the Western and the Eastern society
in respect of the divine agency. In an early period
of Hellenic history that may be called pre-Apolline,
the earth-mother was conspicuously oracular by the
vehicle of dreams ; and this power of hers was generally
shared by the nether god and buried heroes. Nor
could the religion of Apollo suppress this " chthonian "
divination. But in Mesopotamia the earth-powers and
the nether world have no part or lot in this matter.
It is almost the prerogative of Shamash, the sun-god,
though Adad is sometimes associated with him ; l
1 We have also one example of an oracle of Ishtar (in plain prose) ,
Keil. Bibl., ii. p. 179.
COMPARISON OF THE RITUAL 303
both being designated as "Bele-Biri" or "Lords of
Oracles." 1
Another remarkable distinction is the fact that
the ecstatic or enthusiastic form of prophecy, that of
the Shaman or Pythoness possessed and maddened by
the inworking spirit of god, is not found in the Baby-
lonian record, which only attests the cool and scientific
method of interpreting by signs and dreams and the
stars. Perhaps Mesopotamia from the third millennium
onward was too civilised to admit the mad prophet and
prophetess to its counsels. But such characters were
attached to certain Anatolian cults, especially to those
of Kybele, 2 and also to the Syrian goddess at Hierapolis; 3
we have evidence of them also in a record of the Cretan
Phaistos in the service of the Great Mother. 4 Some
scholars have supposed that prophetic ecstasy was only
a late phenomenon in Hellas, because Homer is silent
about it. But there are reasons for suspecting that
demoniac possession was occasionally found in the pre-
Homeric divination of Hellas, 5 an * inheritance perhaps
from the pre-Hellenic period.
In any case, the theory that primitive Hellas was
indebted to Babylonia for its divination-system is strongly
repugnant to the facts.
1 Zimmern, op. cit., p. 89. 2 Cults, iii. p. 297.
3 Lucian, De Dea Syr., 43. 4 Cults, iii. p. 297.
5 Vide Cults, iv. pp. 191-192 ; iii. p. n.
CHAPTER XIV.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS.
THIS comparative exposition of the Sumerian-Baby-
lonian and the most complex and developed pre-Christian
religion of Europe cannot claim to be complete or at
any point finally decisive, but it may at least have
helped to reveal the high value and interest of these
phenomena for the workers in this broad field of inquiry.
This was one of the main objects of this course. The
other was the discussion of a question of religious ethno-
logy, concerning the possible influence of Mesopotamia
on the earliest development of ^ellenic religion. The
verdict must still remain an open one, awaiting the
light of the new evidence that the future will gather.
But the evidence at present available and it may be
hoped that none of first importance has been missed
constrains us to a negative answer or at least a negative
attitude of mind.
Confining ourselves generally to the second mil-
lennium B.C., we have surveyed the religions of the
adjacent peoples between the valley of the Euphrates
and the western shores of the Aegean ; and have
observed that morphologically they are generally on
the same plane of polytheism, but that those of Meso-
potamia and Hellas reveal inner differences, striking
and vital enough to be serious stumbling-blocks to a
theory of affiliation. These differences concern the
304
SUMMARY OF RESULTS 305
personality of the divinities and their relations to the
various parts of the world of nature ; the most salient
being the different attitude of the two peoples to the
divine luminaries of heaven and to the chthonian powers
of the lower world. 9 They concern the cosmogonies
of East and West, their views of the creation of the
world, and the origin of man ; on these matters, certain
myths which are easily diffused do not appear to have
reached Hellas in this early period. They concern the
religious temperaments of the Babylonian and Hellene,
which appear as separate as the opposite points of the
pole ; the rapturous fanatic and self-abasing spirit of
the East contrasting vividly with the coolness, civic
sobriety, and self-confidence of the West. They concern
the eschatologic ideas of the two peoples : the cult of
the dead and some idea of a posthumous judgment
being found in early Hellas, while the former was rare,
and the latter is scarcely discoverable, in Mesopotamia.
They concern, finally, the ritual ; and here the salient
points of contrast are the different views of the sacrifice,
of the sacrificial victim, and the sacrificial blood ; the
different methods of purification and the expulsion of
sin ; the ritual of sorrow associated with the death of
the god, so powerftil in Babylonia and so insignificant
(by comparison) in Hellas ; the un-Hellenic Mylitta-rite,
and the service of the " hierodoulai" ; and, to conclude
with the most vital difference of all, the manifestations
of magic and its relation to the national religions, so
complex, so pregnant for thought and faith, and so
dominant in Mesopotamia ; on the other hand, so insig-
nificant and unobtrusive in Hellas.
Two other points have been incidentally noticed
in our general survey, but it is well in a final summing
up to emphasise their great importance as negative
20
3 o6 GREECE AND BABYLON
evidence. The first concerns the higher history of
European religion : the establishment of religious
mysteries, a phenomenon of dateless antiquity, and of
powerful working in Hellenic and Aegean society, has
not yet been discovered in the Mesopotamian culture.
The second is a small point that concerns commerce
and the trivialities of ritual : the use of incense,
universal from immemorial times in Mesopotamia, and
proved by the earliest documents, begins in Greece not
earlier than the eighth century B.C. This little product,
afterwards everywhere in great demand, for it is pleasant
to the sense, soothing to the mind, and among the
harmless amenities of worship, was much easier to
import than Babylonian theology or more complex
ritual. It might have come without these, but they
could scarcely have come without it. Yet it did not
come to Hellenic shores in the second millennium. And
this trifling negative fact is worth a volume of the higher
criticism for the decision of our question.
Those who still cling to the faith that Babylonia
was the centre whence emanated much Mediterranean
religion, may urge that the negative value of the facts
exposed above may be destroyed by future discoveries.
This is true, but our preliminary hypotheses should be
framed on the facts that are already known. Or they
may urge that the generic resemblances of the two
religious systems with which we have been mainly
concerned are also great. But, as has been observed,
the same generic resemblance exists between Greek and
Vedic polytheism. And for the question of religious
origin general resemblances are far less decisive than
specific points of identity, such, for instance, as the
identity of divine names or of some peculiar divine
attribute. Later we can trace the migrations of Isis
SUMMARY OF RESULTS 307
and Mithras throughout Europe by their names or by the
sistrum or by the type of the fallen bull, of the Hittite god
Teschub in the Graeco-Roman guise of Jupiter Dolichenos
as far as Hungary, perhaps as far as Scandinavia, by the
attribute of the hammer. It is just this sort of evidence of
any trace of Babylonian influence that is lacking among
the records of early Greece. No single Babylonian name
is recognisable in its religious or mythologic nomenclature ;
just as no characteristically Babylonian fashion is found
in its ritual or in the appurtenances of its religion.
This well accords with what is already known of the
Mediterranean history of the second millennium. For
long centuries the Hittite empire was a barrier between
the Babylonian power and the coastlands of Asia Minor.
So far, then, as our knowledge goes at present, there
is no reason for believing that nascent Hellenism, wher-
ever else arose the streams that nourished its spiritual
life, was fertilised by the deep springs of Babylonian
religion or theosophy.
INDEX OF NAMES AND
SUBJECTS.
Adad (Ramman), 62, 101-102, 142,
1.43-
Adonis, 251, 255, 273-274.
Alilat, 44.
Allatu, 57, 206, 218.
Aniconic worship, 225-230.
Animism, 43.
Anthropomorphism, in Greece, 10-12,
75-80; in Mesopotamia, 51-52,
55-57 9 * n Canaan, 57-58 ; in
Hittite religion, 60-6 1 ; in
Phrygia, 63-64 ; in Crete, 64-75.
Aphrodite, Cretan-Mycenaean, 96 ; in
Cyprus, 261 ; Ourania, 272-273.
Apollo, 49, 295 ; theory of Lycian
origin, 90; Agyieus, 136; Del-
phinios, 291 ; Lykeios, 76.
Arabian divinities, 85, 263.
Aramaic divinities, 85.
Artemis, of Brauron, 244 ; in Cilicia,
89 ; at Ephesos, 91 ; aboriginal
Mediterranean goddess, 96.
Aryan migration into Greece, 34.
Asshur, 58, 225.
Astarte, 57, 5?> 59, 86, 107. _
Astral cults, in Mesopotamia, 102 ;
in Greece, 111-114.
Atargatis (Derketo), 57.
Athena, aboriginal Mediterranean
goddess, 96.
Athtar, Arabian deity, 85, 263.
Attar, in Arabia, 168.
Attis, 91, 254-258, 266 ; ILaTralos,
95-
Axe-cult, in Crete, 70, 93.
Baalbec, 273-274.
Baptism, 284.
Bau, Babylonian goddess, 263.
Belit, Babylonian goddess, 83, 84,
104.
Birds, cult of, 63, 69-73.
Boghaz-Keui, reliefs of, 47, 60,
125 ; cuneiform texts at, 6l.
Borrowing, tests of, in religion, 37.
Boundaries, sanctity of, 127-128.
Bouphonia, in Attica, 237-238.
Britomartis, 170.
Bull, Hittite worship of, 252-253.
Burial-customs, 208-210.
Byblos, Adonis-rites at, 273-274.
Chemosh, of Moab, 59, 86.
Cilicia, Assyrian conquests in, 35
(vide Typhoeus).
Cities, religious origin of, 118.
Communion-service with dead, 209.
Confessional-service in Mesopotamia,
151, 288,
Convent-system in Mesopotamia,
268-269.
Cook, Mr., 66, 69, 73.
Cosmogonies, 179-182.
Courtesans, sacred, 269-283.
Cowley, Dr., 90.
Creation of man, 184-185.
Cyprus, religious prostitution in,
Days, sacred character of, 293-295.
Dead, worship of, 122, 210, 211,
213; tendance of, 211, 212;
evocation of, 214-215.
Death of deity, 27-28, 238-240,
249-263.
Demeter, 80.
Demonology, 154, 206-208, 297-300.
Dionysos, 239-240; marriage with
Queen- Archon, 267.
Divination, through sacrifice, 248-
249, 301-302 ; ecstatic, 303.
Dualism, 19, 158.
309
3 io INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS
Ea, Babylonian god, 53, 102, 117,
121.
Eagle, Hittite worship of, 63.
Earth, divinity of, in Mesopotamia,
103 ; in Greece, 114.
Enlil, Babylonian god, 59, 103-104,
142.
Eros, cosmic principle, 181.
Eschatology, 204-220.
Esmun, Phoenician god, 57.
Eunostos, Tanagran vegetation-hero,
262.
Eunuchs, in Phrygian religion, 92,
256-258.
Euyuk, relief at, 61.
Evans, Sir Arthur, 17, 30, 64, 69-71,
73-74, 91, 97, 211, 227.
Evil gods, 19, 142-143.
Faith, not a religious virtue in
Greece, 23-24.
Fanaticism, in Mesopotamia, 197-
203.
Fassirlir, Lion-goddess at, 88.
Father-god, 48, 95.
Fetichism, 225-228.
Fire-ejod, in Greece and Babylon,
146-147, 285.
Fire-purification, 285-286.
Frazer, Dr., 17, 60, 79, 89, 257 n. i,
277, 282.
Functional deities (Sondergotter),
no, 133.
Goddess-worship, importance of, 5,
81-82; in Mesopotamia, 17,
82-84 ; among Western Semites,
85-86 ; Hittites, 87-88 ; on Asia-
Minor coast, 88-91 ; in Crete,
92-94 ; Aryan tradition of, 94-
96 ; in early Greece, 96-98.
Hammer, sacred Hittite symbol, 63.
Hammurabi, code of, 129-132, 212.
Harpalyke, legend of, 239.
Harrison, Miss Jane, 67, 69-70.
Hartland, Mr. Sidney, 271 n. i,
280-281.
Hearth-worship, 132-133.
Helios, at Tyre and Palmyra, 107 ;
in Greece, uo-in.
Hell, Babylonian conception of,
205-206
Hera, ? Aryan -Hellenic, 96;
76.
Hierodoulai, 272.
Hittite ethnology, 36.
Hogarth, Dr., 74.
Homicide, Babylonian laws concern-
ing, 129-130; Hellenic religious
feeling about, 138-140; purifica-
tion from, 287-288.
Hyakinthos, 262.
Ibriz, Hittite monument at, 47.
Idolatry, in Greece, 12-13, 228.
Incense, 231-232, 306.
Incest, Babylonian laws concerning,
131-
Incubation, divination by, 302.
Ira, goddess of plague, 143.
Ishtar, 55, 83, 103, 120, 142, 164-
167 ; descent of, 204, 208.
Jastrow, Prof., 37, 58.
Katharsis, Homeric, 289-291.
Kingship, divine character of, in
Mesopotamia, 119, 122-123 ;
among Western Semites, 123 ;
among Hittites, 124-125 ; in
Phrygia, 125 ; in Crete, 125-126 ;
in Greece, 126-127.
Knots, magic use of, 300.
Kybele, 63, 91-92, 109, 170, 226.
Labartu, demon -goddess, 298.
Langdon, Dr., 56, 205 n. I, 296, 298.
Leto ? Lycian origin of, 89-90,
Leukothea, 261.
Linos, 197, 262.
Lion-divinity, Phrygian Hittite Meso-
potamian type, 62-63.
Lykaon, Arcadian sacrifice of, 239.
Ma, Anatolian goddess, 169, 272.
Magic, in Greece, 158, 176-179, 292-
293 ; in Babylon, 291-301.
Male deity, predominant among
Semites, 85-86; at Olba and
Tarsos and in Lycia, 89.
Mannhardt, 276.
Marduk, 103, 120, 265.
Marriage of god and goddess, 263-
268 ; marriage ceremonies in
Babylon, 134.
Mercy, attribute of divinity, 158-160.
Minotaur, 74, 266-267.
Mitani inscriptions, 46.
Monotheism, 187-189.
Monsters, in Cretan art, 74-75.
Moon-worship, Semitic, 85 ; Hellenic,
112.
Morality and religion, 20.
Mylitta, rites of, 269-271.
INDEX OF NAMES AND SUBJECTS 311
Nature-worship, 40-41, 97 ; in Meso-
potamia, 99-106 ; West-Semitic,
106-107 J Hittite, 108 ; Hellenic,
110-114.
Nebo, 52, 102, 119, 121, 188.
Nergal, 101, 142.
N??0dXia, wineless offerings, 112.
Ninib, 101, 117, 127, 263.
Njnlil, 84.
Ninni, relief of, 52.
Nusku, 117.
Omnipotence, divine attribute, 173-
I7S-
Orotal, Arabian deity, 44.
Pan-Babylonism, 30-33.
Pantheism, 161-162.
Perjury, 147-149.
Personal religion, 191-196.
Pessimism, in Babylonian hymns,
I5S-
Petrie, Professor, 223.
Phallic cults, 228-230.
Phratric system, religious sanction of,
in Greece, 138 ; non-existent (?)
in Mesopotamia, 138.
Poseidon, 146.
Punishment, posthumous, 215-216.
Purification, 155-158, 282-291.
Purity, 163-172.
Qadistu, meaning of, 269.
Ramman, vide Adad.
Ramsay, Sir William, 117, 170, 273,
277.
Rewards, posthumous, 216-218.
Sacrament, 25-26, 236-242, 250.
Sacrifice, theory of, 24-26, 235-236,
240-242; bloodless, 230-231;
chthonian, 233 ; human, 244-
246 ; at oath-taking, 247-248 ;
"sober," 231-232; vicarious,
242-244.
Sandon, 252-253.
Sayce, Professor, 169, 253.
Scapegoat, 247.
Science, relation to religion, in
Greece and Mesopotamia, 23.
Sentimentality, in Babylonian re-
ligion, 196-197.
Sex, confusion of, 58-60.
Shamash, Babylonian sun-god, 99,
100, I20-I2I, 127, 142, 208,
302.
Sin, Babylonian moon-god, 99, 100.
Sin, non-moral ideas of, 152-154.
Sinjerli, relief at, 61.
Smith, Prof. Robertson, 25, 226,
235, 238, 241.
Snake-goddess, in Crete, 64-65 ;
snake- cult, 78,
Tammuz, 105-106, 219-220, 242,
250-263.
Tanit, Carthaginian goddess, 168.
Taurobolion, 253.
Temples, erection of, 223-225 ; deifi-
cation of, 225.
Teshup, Hittite god, 46, 62.
Teukridai, at Olba, 89.
Theanthropic animal, 77-78.
Theism, 7-9, 40-49.
Theriomorphism, in Egypt, 15 ; in
Mesopotamia, 14, 52-55 ; in
other Semitic communities 3 57-
58 ; Hittite, 60-62 ; in Crete,
66-75 5 in Greece, 75-80.
Tiftmat, in Babylonian cosmogony,
181.
Tiele, Professor, 40, 42, 8 1, 199.
Tralles, religious prostitutes at, 275.
Trinities, 185-187.
Truthfulness, religious virtue, 148.
Typhoeus, legend of, 182-183.
Van Gennep, 279.
Ver Sacrum, in Greece, 137.
Virgin-goddesses, not found among
Aryans, 95 ; Mediterranean, 96.
Virginity, sacrifice of, 269-281.
Virgin-Mother, idea of, 166-171.
Westermarck, Professor, 41 n. i, 278.
Wilde, Dr., I.
Word, mystic value of, 15, 56, 57,
176-179, 295-297.
Worship, ambiguity in term, 67, 77.
Zeus, 49; grave of, in Crete, 93,
259-260 ; Herkeios, 149-150 ;
Horios, 152 ; Kouros, 259 ;
Panamaros in Caria, 90 ; Polieus,
238 ; Thunderer in Bithynia, 95.
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T. & T. CLARK'S PUBLICATIONS.
A GREAT ENCYCLOPAEDIA.
VOLUMES ONE, TWO, AND THREE NOW READY
VOLUME FOUR NEARLY READY
ENCYCLOPAEDIA
OF
RELIGION AND ETHICS
EDITED BY
DR. JAMES HASTINGS.
HP HE purpose of this Encyclopaedia is to give a complete account of
* Religion and Ethics so far as they are known. It will contain
articles on every separate religious belief and practice, and on every ethical
or philosophical idea and custom. Persons and places that have contri-
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is the department which has always exercised the greatest influence over
men's lives, and its interest at least, if not its influence, is probably greater
at the present time than ever. Within the scope of ' Religion and Ethics '
come all the questions that are most keenly debated in PSYCHOLOGY and
in SOCIALISM, while the title will be used to embrace the whole of
THEOLOGY and PHILOSOPHY. Ethics and Morality will be handled as
thoroughly as religion.
It is estimated that the work will be completed in Ten Volumes oi
about 900 pages each, size 1 1 J by 9.
PRICE
In Cloth Binding . . 285. net per volume.
In Half-Morocco . . 343. net per volume.
OR, EACH VOLUME MAY BE HAD IN 12 MONTHLY PARTS,
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TJufull Prospectus may be had from any bookseller, or from tfa
Publishers, on request.
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ment which the world of readers and investigators can give it.' Athenaum,
A very warm tribute is due to the eminent publishers, Messrs, T. & T. Clark.
They have done their part to admiration. No handier or more handsome encyclopaedia
exists. It is well printed, well bound, and very light in the hand. Those who know
the immense risk and pams involved in a work of this kind will know how to estimate
the services of Messrs. Clark in what is, we think, the boldest and most enterprising
venture in religious literature which has ever been undertaken in this country. We
wish them all the success they deserve, and that success should be very great. The
services of Dr. Hastings and his loyal colleague Br. Selbie demand an acknowledgment
not less ample. . . . The scope of this encyclopaedia is immense, and as for the quality
of the articles, the list of the contributors proves that it is in general very high.
It will be one of the most reassuring and encouraging signs of the times if this great
H7 2/ aS CCnt enter P nse rece i ve s adequate encouragement and recognition.' British
' No library could be better provided with what men have said and thought through
the ages on Religion and Ethics and all they imply than by this one library in itself.
. . . borne ot tne articles themselves summarise a whole literature/ Public Opinion.
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